
Class "? H t0 Jl2^ 
Book ^.JVUS 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



PARTS OF SPEECH 

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH 



^ooks by Grander (Matthews : 


Essays and Criticisms 




French Dramatists of tl" 


le 19th Century 


Pen and Ink, Essays on 


subjects of more 


or less importance 




Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays 


The Historical Novel, a 


nd other Essays 


Parts of Speech, Essays 


on English 


The Development of 


the Drama (in 


preparation) 





PARTS OF SPEECH 



ESSAYS ON ENGLISH 



BY 



BRANDER MATTHEWS 

PROFESSOR IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1901 






THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two CoPtfea Received 

SEP. 7 1901 



R(QHT ENTRY 



ICLAS5 A XXc. Net. 



COPY B. 



Copyright, 1901, by 
Brander Matthews 



Published Septembfr, 1901 



THE CAXTON PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



I. 



TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER 

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION 

IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



PREFATORY NOTE 

ALTHO the various essays which are now 
l\ brought together in this book have been 
written from time to time during the past ten 
years, nearly all of them have had their origin in 
a desire to make plain and to emphasize one 
fact: that the English language belongs to the 
peoples who speak it— that it is their own pre- 
cious possession, to deal with at their pleasure 
and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be 
obvious enough to all of us; and yet there would 
be no difficulty in showing that it is not every- 
where accepted. Perhaps the best way to pre- 
sent it so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to 
draw attention to some of its implications; and 
this is what has been attempted in one or another 
of these separate papers. 

The point of view from which the English lan- 
guage has been approached is that of the man of 
letters rather than that of the professed expert in 
linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that 
the professed expert, even tho he discovers little 



PREFATORY NOTE 

that is new in these pages, will find also little 
that demands his disapproval. The final essay 
is frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is 
an attempt to define not so much a word as a 
thing. 

So wise a critic of literature and of language as 
Sainte-Beuve has declared that " orthography is 
like society: it will never be entirely reformed; 
but we can at least make it less vicious." In this 
sensible saying is the warrant for the simplified 
spellings adopted in the following pages. As 
will be seen by readers of the two papers on our 
orthography, the writer is by no means a radical 
*' spelling-reformer," so called. But he believes 
that all of us who wish to keep the English lan- 
guage up to its topmost efficiency are bound al- 
ways to do all in our power to aid the tendency 
toward simplification— whether of orthography 
or of syntax— which has been at work unceas- 
ingly ever since the language came into existence. 

B. M. 

Columbia University, 
July 4, 1901. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I The Stock that Speaks the Language . 3 

II The Future of the Language .... 29 

III The English Language in the United 

States 47 

IV The Language in Great Britain ... 81 
V Americanisms Once More 97 

VI New Words and Old 127 

^ VII The Naturalisation of Foreign Words . 165 

VIII The Function of Slang 187 

IX Questions of Usage 217 

X An Inquiry as to Rime 241 

XI On the Poetry of Place-Names . . .271 
Xli As to ''American Spelling'* .... 295 

XIII The Simplification of English Spelling 319 

XIV Americanism — An Attempt at a Defini- 

tion 343 



I 

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS 
THE LANGUAGE 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS 
THE LANGUAGE 

IT is a thousand years since the death of 
the great Englishman, King Alfred, in whose 
humble translations we may see the beginnings 
of English literature. Until it has a literature, 
however unpretending and however artless, a 
language is not conscious of itself; and it is there- 
fore in no condition to maintain its supremacy 
over the dialects that are its jealous rivals. And 
it is by its literature chiefly that a language for- 
ever binds together the peoples who speak it— by 
a literature in which the characteristics of these 
peoples are revealed and preserved, and in which 
their ideals are declared and passed down from 
generation to generation as the most precious 
heritage of the race. 

The historian of the English people asserts that 
what made Alfred great, small as was his sphere 
of action, was *'the moral grandeur of his life. 
He lived solely for the good of his people." He 
laid the foundations for a uniform system of law, 
3 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

and he started schools, wishing that every free- 
born youth who had the means should " abide at 
his book till he can understand English writing." 
He invited scholars from other lands to settle in 
England; but what most told on English culture 
was done not by them but by the king himself. 
He ** resolved to throw open to his people in their 
own tongue the knowledge which till then had 
been limited to the clergy," and he ''took his 
books as he found them," the popular manuals 
of the day, Bede and Boethius and Orosius. 
These he translated with his own hand, editing 
freely, and expanding and contracting as he saw 
fit. " Do not blame me if any know Latin better 
than I," he explained with modest dignity; "for 
every man must say what he says and must do 
what he does according to his ability." And 
Green, from whom this quotation is borrowed, 
insists that, ''simple as was his aim, Alfred created 
English literature"— the English literature which 
is still alive and sturdy after a thousand years, and 
which is to-day flourishing not only in Great 
Britain, where Alfred founded it, but here in the 
United States, in a larger land, the existence of 
which the good king had no reason ever to sur- 
mise. 

This English literature is like the language in 
which it is written, and also like the stock that 
speaks the language, wherever the race may have 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

planted or transplanted itself, whether by the 
banks of the little Thames or on the shores of the 
broad Hudson and the mighty Mississippi. Lit- 
erature and language and people are practical, no 
doubt; but they are not what they are often 
called: they are not prosaic. On the contrary, 
they are poetic, essentially and indisputably 
poetic. The peoples that speak English are, and 
always have been, self-willed and adventurous. 
This they were long before King Alfred's time, 
in the early days when they were Teutons merely, 
and had not yet won their way into Britain; 
and this they are to-day, when the most of them 
no longer dwell in old England, but in the newer 
England here in America. They have ever lacked 
the restraint and reserve which are the conditions 
of the best prose; and they have always exulted 
in the untiring energy and the daring imagination 
which are the vital elements of poetry. " In his 
busiest days Alfred found time to learn the old 
songs of his race by heart," so the historian tells 
us ; " and he bade them be taught in the palace- 
school." 

Lyric is what English literature has always 
been at its best, lyric and dramatic; and the 
men who speak English have always been indi- 
vidual and independent, every man ready to fight 
for his own hand; and the English language 
has gone on its own way, keeping its strength in 
5 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

spite of the efforts of pedants and pedagogs to 
bind it and to stifle it, and ever insisting on re- 
newing its freshness as best it could. Develop- 
ment there has been in language and in literature 
and in the stock itself, development and growth 
of many kinds ; but no radical change can be de- 
tected in all these ten centuries. " No national 
art is good which is not plainly the nation's own," 
said Mr. Stopford Brooke in his consideration of 
the earliest English lyrics. " The poetry of Eng- 
land has owed much to the different races which 
mingled with the original English race; it has 
owed much to the different types of poetry it 
absorbed— Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian, 
Spanish: but below all these admixtures the 
English nature wrought its steady will. It 
seized, it transmuted, it modified, it mastered 
these admixtures both of races and of song." 

The English nature wrought its steady will; 
but what is this English nature, thus set up as an 
entity and endowed with conscious purpose ? Is 
there such a thing, of a certainty ? Can there be 
such a thing, indeed ? These questions are easier 
to ask than to answer. It is true that we have 
been accustomed to credit certain races not merely 
with certain characteristics, but even with certain 
qualities, esteeming certain peoples to be spe- 
cially gifted in one way or another. For example, 
we have held it as an article of faith that the 
6 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

Greeks, by their display of a surpassing sense of 
form, proved their possession of an artistic capa- 
city finer and richer than that revealed by any 
other people since the dawn of civilization. And 
again, we have seen in the Roman skill in con- 
structive administration, in the Latin success in 
law-making and in road-building— we have seen 
in this the evidence of a native faculty denied to 
their remote predecessors, the Egyptians. Now 
come the advocates of a later theory, who tell us 
that the characteristics of the Greeks and of the 
Romans are not the result of any inherent su- 
periority of theirs, or of any native predisposition 
toward art or toward administration, but are 
caused rather by circumstances of climate, of geo- 
graphical situation, and of historical position. 
We are assured now that the Romans, had they 
been in the place of the Greeks and under like 
circumstances, might have revealed themselves 
as great masters of form ; while the Greeks, had 
their history been that of the Romans, would 
certainly have shown the same power of ruling 
themselves and others, and of compacting the 
most diverse nations into a single empire. 

No doubt the theory of race-characteristics, of 
stocks variously gifted with specific faculties, 
has been too vigorously asserted and unduly in- 
sisted upon. It was so convenient and so useful 
that it could not help being overworked. But 

7 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

altho it is not so impregnable as it was sup- 
posed to be, it need not be surrendered at the 
first attack; and altho we are compelled to 
abandon the theory as a whole, we can save 
what it contained of truth. And therefore it is 
well to bear in mind that even if the Greeks in 
the beginning had no sharper bent toward art 
than had the Phenicians,— from whom they bor- 
rowed so much of value to be made by them 
more valuable,— even if their esthetic superiority 
was the result of a happy chapter of chances, it 
was a fact nevertheless ; and a time came at last 
when the Greeks were seen to be possessed of a 
fertility of invention and of a sense of form sur- 
passing all their predecessors had ever exhibited. 
When this time came the Greeks were conscious 
of their unexampled achievements and properly 
proud of them ; and they proved that they were 
able to transmit from sire to son this artistic 
aptitude— however the aptitude itself had been 
developed originally. So whether the Roman 
power to govern and to evolve the proper instru- 
ments of government was a native gift of the 
Latins, or whether it was developed in them by 
a fortuitous combination of geographical and his- 
torical circumstances, this question is somewhat 
academic, since we know that the Romans did 
display extraordinary administrative ability cen- 
tury after century. Whenever it was evolved, 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

the artistic type in Greece and the administrative 
type in Italy was persistent; and it reappeared 
again and again in successive generations. 

This indeed needs always to be remembered, 
that race-characteristics, whatever their origin, 
are strangely enduring when once they are estab- 
lished. The English nature whereof Mr. Stop- 
ford Brooke speaks, when once it was conscious 
of itself, worked its steady will, despite the 
changes of circumstance; and only very slowly 
is it modified by the accidents of later history and 
geography. M. Fouillee has set side by side the 
description of the Germans by Tacitus and the 
account of the Gauls by Caesar, drawing attention 
to the fact that the modern French are now very 
like the ancient Gauls, and that the descendants 
of the Germans of old, the various branches of 
the Teutonic race, have the characteristics of their 
remote ancestors whom the Roman historian 
chose to praise by way of warning for his fellow- 
citizens. 

The Romans conquered Gaul and held it for 
centuries; the Franks took it in turn and gave it 
their name; but the Gallic type was so securely 
fixed that the Roman first and then the Frank 
succumbed to it and were absorbed into it. The 
Gallic type is not now absolutely unchanged, for, 
after all, the world does move; but it is readily 
recognizable to this day. Certain of Caesar's 
9 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

criticisms read as tho they were written by a 
contemporary of Napoleon. As Caesar saw them 
the Gauls were fickle in counsel and fond of re- 
volutions. Believing in false rumors, they were 
led into deeds they regretted afterward. Decid- 
ing questions of importance without reflection, 
they were ready to war without reason; and they 
were weak and lacking in energy in time of dis- 
aster. They were cast down by a first defeat, as 
they were inflamed by a first victory. They were 
affable, light, inconstant, and vain; they were 
quick-witted and ready-tongued ; they had a lik- 
ing for tales and an insatiable curiosity for news. 
They cultivated eloquence, having an astonishing 
facility of speech, and of letting themselves be 
taken in by words. And having thus summed 
up Caesar's analysis of the Gaul, M. Fouillee asks 
how after this we can deny the persistence of 
national types. 

What Tacitus has to say of the Germans comes 
home more closely to us who speak English, since 
the Teutonic tribes the Latin historian was con- 
sidering are not more the ancestors of the modern 
Prussians than they are of the wide-spread Anglo- 
Saxon peoples. As those v/ho speak English 
went from the mainland across the North Sea to 
an island and dwelt there for centuries, and were 
joined by earlier kin from elsewhere, the race- 
characteristics were obviously modified a little— 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

just as they have been as obviously modified a 
little more when some of those who spoke Eng- 
lish went out again from the island to a boundless 
continent across the Atlantic, and were joined 
here by many others, most of whom were also 
derived from one or another of the varied Teu- 
tonic stocks. 

It is nearly two thousand years since Tacitus 
studied the Teutonic race-characteristics, and yet 
most of the peculiarities he noted then are evident 
now. Tacitus tells us that the Teutons were 
tall, fair-haired, and flegmatic. They were great 
eaters, not to say gross feeders; and they were 
given to strong drink. They were fond of games, 
and were ready to pay their losses with their 
persons, if need be. They were individual and 
independent. Their manners were rude, not to 
call them violent. They were possessed of the 
domestic virtues, the women being chaste and 
the husbands faithful. They loved war as they 
loved liberty. They had a passionate fidelity to 
their leaders. They decided important questions 
of policy in public assembly. 

The several peoples of our own time who are 
descended from the Teutons thus described by 
Tacitus with so sympathetic an insight have 
been developing for twenty centuries, more or 
less, each in its own way, under influences 
wholly unlike, influences both geographical and 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

historical; and it is small wonder that they have 
diverged as they have, and that no one of them 
nowadays completely represents the original 
stock. Some of the points Tacitus made are true 
to-day in Prussia and are not true in Great Britain ; 
and some hit home here in the United States, 
altho they miss the mark in Germany. The 
modern Germans still retain a few of these Taci- 
tean characteristics which the peoples that speak 
English have lost in their adventurous career over- 
seas. And on the other hand, certain of the 
remarks of Tacitus might be made to-day in the 
United States; for example, the willingness to 
run risks for the fun of the game— is not this a 
present characteristic of the American as we 
know him ? And here we have always been 
governed by town-meeting, as the old Teutons 
were, whereas the modern German is only now 
getting this back by borrowing it from the 
English precedent. In our private litigations 
we continue to abide by the customs of our 
remote Teutonic ancestors, while the German 
has accepted as a legal guide the Roman law, 
wrought out by the countrymen of Tacitus. 

Second only to a community of language, no 
unifying force is more potent than a community 
of law. In the depths of their dark forests the 
Teutons had already evolved their own rudi- 
mentary code by which they did justice between 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

man and man; and these customary sanctions 
were taken over to Britain by the Angles and 
the Saxons and the Jutes; and they served as 
the foundation of the common law by means of 
which the peoples that speak English still ad- 
minister justice in their courts. And here again 
we find the handiwork of the great King Alfred, 
from whom we may date the codification of an 
English law as we may also reckon the establish- 
ing of an English literature. With the opportu- 
nism of our race, he had no thought of a new 
legislation, but merely merged the best of the 
tribal customs into a law for the whole kingdom. 
The king sought to bring to light and to leave on 
record the righteous rulings of the wise men who 
had gone before. " Those things which I met 
with," so the historian transmits his words, 
" either of the days of Ine, my kinsman, or of 
Offa, King of the Mercians, or of y^thelberht, 
who first among the English race received bap- 
tism, those which seemed to me rightest, those 
I have gathered, and rejected the rest." 

Law and language— these are the unrelaxing 
bands that hold a race firmly together. There 
are now two main divisions of the Teutonic 
stock, separated to-day by language and by law 
—the people who speak German and are ruled 
by Roman law, and the peoples who speak Eng- 
lish and are governed by the common law; and 
•3 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

the separation is as wide and as deep legally as 
it is linguistically. '' By the forms of its language 
a nation expresses its very self," said one of the 
acutest of British critics; and we have the proof 
of this at hand in the characteristic differences 
between the English language and the German. 
By the forms of its law a people expresses its po- 
litical beliefs; and we have the evidence of this in 
the fact that we Americans regard our rulers 
merely as agents of the town-meeting of the old 
Teutons, while the modern Germans are submit- 
ting to a series of trials for lese-majesty. 

Laws have most weight when they are seen to 
be the expression of the common conscience; 
and they are most respected when they best 
reflect the ideals that are " the souls of the nations 
which cherish them," as a historian of American 
literature has finely phrased it— "the living spirits 
which waken nationality into being, and which 
often preserve its memory long after its life has 
ebbed away." The marked difference now ob- 
vious between the two great divisions of the 
Teutonic stock— that which speaks English and 
that which speaks German— is due in part to their 
not having each conserved exactly the same por- 
tion of the ideals inherited from their common 
ancestors, and in part to their having each ac- 
quired other ideals in the course of the many 
centuries of their separate existence. And the 
14 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

minor differences to be detected between the 
two great divisions of the stock that speaks Eng- 
lish, that dwelling in Great Britain and that 
dwelling in the United States, are due to similar 
causes. 

While the ancestors of the people who speak 
German were abiding at home, where Tacitus had 
seen them, the ancestors of the peoples who 
speak English went forth across the North Sea 
and possessed themselves of the better part of 
Great Britain and gave it a new name. They 
were not content to defeat the earlier inhabitants 
in fair fight, and then to leave them in peace, as 
the Romans did, ruling them and intermarrying 
with them; the English thrust the natives out 
violently and harried them away. As Green 
puts it tersely, " The English conquest for a hun- 
dred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession 
and driving back of the people whom the Eng- 
lish conquered." No doubt this dispossession 
was ruthless; but was it complete? The new- 
comers took the land for their own, and they 
meant to kill out all the original owners ; but 
was this possible.? The country was rough and 
thickly wooded, and it abounded in nooks and 
corners where a family might hide itself. More- 
over, what is more likely than that the invader 
should often spare a woman and take her to 
wife.? For centuries the English kept spreading 

15 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

themselves and pushing back the Britons; but 
in the long war there were truces now and 
again, and what is more likely than an incessant 
intermingling of the blood all along the border 
as it was slowly driven forward ? 

Certain it is that one of the influences which 
have modified the modern English stock is a 
Celtic strain. If the peoples that speak English 
are now not quite like the people that speak Ger- 
man, plainly this is one reason : they have had a 
Celtic admixture, which has lightened them and 
contributed elements lacking in the original 
Teuton. To declare just what these elements 
are is not easy; but to deny their presence is 
impossible. The Celt has an impetuosity and a 
swiftness of perception which we do not fmd in 
the original Teuton, and which the man who 
speaks English is now more likely to possess 
than the man who speaks German. The Celt 
has a certain shy delicacy; he has a happy sensi- 
bility and a turn for charming sentiment; he has 
a delightful lyric note; and he has at times a sin- 
cere and puissant melancholy. These are all 
qualities which we find in our English literature, 
and especially in its greatest figure. " The Celts 
do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed 
population," said Henry Morley in a striking pas- 
sage. ** But for early, frequent, and various con- 
tact with the race that in its half-barbarous days 
16 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

invented Ossian's dialogues with St. Patrick, and 
that quickened afterward the Northmen's blood 
in France, Germanic England would not have 
produced a Shakspere." 

Here we see Morley declaring that the Celt had 
"quickened the Northmen's blood in France"; 
and perhaps by his choice of a word he meant to 
remind us that whereas the Northmen who sailed 
down the mouth of the Seine were Teutons, the 
Normans who were to sail up to Hastings had 
been materially modified during their sojourn in 
France, which had once been Celtic Gaul. Two 
series of occasions there were when the English 
received an accession of Celtic blood: first, 
when they conquered England; and second, 
when they in turn were conquered by the Nor- 
mans, who ruled them for centuries, and were 
finally merged in them, just as earlier the Romans 
had been merged in the Gauls. And this recalls 
to us the fact that there was more in the Norman 
than the intermingling of the Teuton and the 
Celt; there was in the Norman also not a little 
of the Roman who had so long ruled Gaul, and 
who had so deeply marked it with certain of his 
own characteristics. Thus it was that the Nor- 
man brought into England a Latin tradition; he 
had acquired something of the Roman adminis- 
trative skill, something of the Roman's genius 
for affairs. After the Renascence, Latin influ- 

»7 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

ences were to affect the English language and 
English literature; but it was after the conquest 
that the English people itself came first in con- 
tact with certain of the Roman ideals. 

Matthew Arnold thought that we owed "to 
the Latin element in our language the most of 
that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which 
it is contradistinguished from the modern Ger- 
man"; and he found in the Latinized Normans 
in England " the sense for fact, which the Celts 
had not, and the love of strenuousness, clearness, 
and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the 
Saxons had not. " Perhaps the English feeling for 
style, our command of the larger rhetoric, may be 
due to this blend of the Norman ; and it cannot be 
denied that this gift has not been granted to the 
modern German. The fantastic brilliancy of 
De Quincey and the sonorous picturesqueness of 
Ruskin are alike inconceivable in the language 
of Klopstock; and altho there is a pregnant 
concision in the speeches of Bismarck at his best, 
there is no German orator who ever attained the 
unfailing dignity and the lofty affluence of Web- 
ster at his best. 

Less than two centuries after the good King 
Alfred had declared English law and established 
English literature, the Normans came and saw 
and conquered. Less than three centuries after 
King William took the land there was born the 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

first great English poet. If the language is to-day 
what it is, it is because of Chaucer, who chose 
the court dialect of London to write in, and who 
made it supple for his own use and the use of 
the poets that were to come after. The Norman 
conquest had brought a new and needed contri- 
bution to the English character; it had resulted in 
an immense enrichment of the English language; 
and it had related English literature again to the 
broad current of European life. To the original 
Teutonic basis had been added Celtic and Norman 
and Latin strains; and still the English nature 
wrought its steady will, still it expressed itself 
most freely and most fully in poetry. And in no 
other poet are certain aspects of this English na- 
ture more boldly displayed than in Chaucer, in 
whom we find a fresh feeling for the visible 
world, a true tenderness of sentiment, a joyous 
breadth of humor, and a resolute yet delicate han- 
dling of human character. 

Two centuries after Chaucer came Shakspere, 
in whom the English nature finds its fullest ex- 
pression. The making of England was then 
complete; all the varied elements had been fused 
in the fire of a struggle for existence and welded 
by war with the most powerful of foes. The 
race-characteristics were then finally determined; 
and in Elizabethan literature they are splendidly 
exhibited. Something was contributed by the 
»9 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

literature of the Spain that the Elizabethans had 
stoutly withstood, and something more by the 
literature of the Italy so many of them knew by 
travel; but all was absorbed, combined, and as- 
similated by the English nature, like the contri- 
butions that came from the classics of Rome and 
Greece. Bacon and Cecil, Drake and Ralegh, 
are not more typical of that sudden and glorious 
outpouring of English individuality than are Mar- 
lowe, Shakspere, andjonson, Spenser, Chapman, 
and Massinger. In that greatest period of the 
race we do not know which is the greater, 
the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity, 
the ability to govern, that the English then dis- 
played, or the mighty sweep and range of the 
imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry. 
The works of the Elizabethan writers are with 
us, like the memory of the deeds of the Eliza- 
bethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was need- 
ful, that the peoples that speak English are of a 
truth poetic, that they are not prosaic. 

In the days of Elizabeth the English began to 
go abroad and to settle here and there. To those 
who came to America there were added in due 
season many vigorous folk from other Teu- 
tonic sources ; and here in the centuries that have 
followed was to be seen a fusion of races and a 
welding into one nation such as had been seen 
in England itself several centuries earlier. To 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

those who remained in England there came few 
accretions from the outside, altho when the 
edict of Nantes was revoked the English gained 
much that the French lost. The Huguenots were 
stanch men and sturdy, of great ability often, 
and of a high seriousness. Some crossed the 
Channel and some crossed the ocean; and no one 
of the strands which have been twisted to make 
the modern American is more worthy than this. 
More important than this French contribution, 
perhaps, was another infusion of the Celtic in- 
fluence. When the King of Scotland became 
King of England, his former subjects swarmed 
to London— preceding by a century the Irishmen 
who made themselves more welcome in the 
English capital, with their airy wit and their 
touch of Celtic sentiment. Far heavier than the 
Scotch raid into England, and the Irish invasion, 
was the influx of Scotch, of Irish, and of Scotch- 
Irish into America. At the very time when Lord 
Lyndhurst was expressing the opinion that the 
English held the Irish to be ''aliens in blood, 
aliens in speech, aliens in religion," the Irish 
were withdrawing in their thousands from the 
rule of a people that felt thus toward them ; and 
they were making homes for themselves where 
prejudice against them was not potent. Yet 
in England itself the Irish left their mark on lit- 
erature, especially upon comedy, for which they 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

have ever revealed a delightful aptitude; and in 
the eighteenth century alone the stage is lightened 
and brightened by the plays of Steele, of Sheridan, 
and of Goldsmith. About the end of the same 
century also the Scotch began to make their 
significant and stimulating contribution to Eng- 
lish literature, which was refreshed again by Burns 
with his breath of sympathy, by Scott with his 
many-sided charm, and by Byron with his re- 
sonant note of revolt. 

Just as the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes 
had mingled in Great Britain to make the English- 
man, and had been modified by Celtic and Nor- 
man and Latin influences, so here in the United 
States the Puritan and the Cavalier, the Dutchman 
and the Huguenot and the German, the Irish and 
the Scotch and the Scotch-Irish, have all blended 
to make the American. Not a few of the original 
Teutonic race-characteristics recorded by Tacitus 
are here now, as active as ever; and not a few of 
the English race-characteristics as revealed by the 
Elizabethan dramatists survive in America, keep- 
ing company with many a locution which has 
dropped out of use in England itself. There is 
to-day in the spoken speech of the United States 
a larger freedom than in the spoken speech of 
Great Britain, a figurative vigor that the Eliza- 
bethans would have relished and understood. It 
is not without significance that the game of cards 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

best liked by the adventurers who worried the 
Armada should have been born again to delight 
the Argonauts of '49. The characteristic energy 
of the English stock, never more exuberantly 
displayed than under Elizabeth, suffered no dimi- 
nution in crossing the Atlantic; rather has it been 
strengthened on this side, since every native 
American must be the descendant of some man 
more venturesome than his kin who thought best 
to stay at home. Nor is the energy less imagi- 
native, altho it has not taken mainly a literary 
expression. " There was no chance for poetry 
among the Puritans," so Lowell reminded us, 
" and yet if any people have a right to imagination, 
it should be the descendants of those very Puri- 
tans." And he added tersely : " They had enough 
of it, or they could never have conceived the 
great epic they did, whose books are States, and 
which is written on this continent from Maine to 
California." 

More than half those who speak English now 
dwell in the United States, and less than a third 
dwell within the British Isles. To some it may 
seem merely fanciful, no doubt, but still the ques- 
tion may be put, whether the British or the 
American is to-day really closer to the Eliza- 
bethan ? It has recently been remarked that the 
typical John Bull was invisible in England while 
Shakspere was alive, and that he has become 
23 



/ 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

possible in Great Britain only since the day when 
these United States declared their independence. 
Walter Bagehot, the shrewdest of critics of his 
fellow-countrymen, maintained that the saving 
virtue of the British people of the middle of 
the nineteenth century was a stolidity closely 
akin to stupidity. But surely the Elizabethans 
were not stolid; and the Americans (who have 
been accused of many things) have never been 
accused of stupidity. Mr. Bernard Bosanquet 
has just been insisting that the two dominant 
notes of the British character at the beginning of 
the twentieth century are insularity and inarticu- 
lateness. The Elizabethan was braggart and self- 
pleased and arrogant, but he was not fairly open 
to the reproach of insularity, nor was he in the 
least inarticulate. Perhaps insularity and inarti- 
culateness are inseparable; and it may be that it is 
the immense variety of the United States that has 
preserved the American from the one, as the prac- 
tice of the town-meeting has preserved him from 
the other. 

No longer do we believe that there is any spe- 
cial virtue in the purity of race, even if we could 
discover nowadays any people who had a just 
right to pride themselves on this. The French 
are descended from the Gauls, but to the Gauls 
have been added Romans and Franks ; the Eng- 
lish are descended from the Teutons, but they 
24 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

have received many accretions from other 
sources; and the Americans are descended from 
the British, but it is undeniable that they have 
differentiated themselves somehow. The ad- 
mixture of varied stocks is held to be a source 
of freshness and of renewed vitality; and it may 
be that this is the cause of the American alertness 
and venturesomeness. And as yet these foreign 
elements have but little modified the essential 
type; for just as the English nature wrought its 
steady will through the centuries, so the Ameri- 
can characteristics have been imposed on all the 
welter of nationalities that swirl together in the 
United States. 

Throughout the land there is one language, a 
development of the language of King Alfred, and 
one law, a development of the law of King Alfred ; 
and throughout the land there are schools such 
as the good king wished for. American ideals 
are not quite the same as British ideals, but 
they differ only a little, and they have both flow- 
ered from the English root, as the earlier English 
ideals had flowered from a Teutonic root. The 
English stock has displayed in the United States 
the same marvelous assimilating faculty that it 
displayed centuries ago in Great Britain, the same 
extraordinary power of getting the sojourners 
within its borders to accept its ideals. The law 
of imitation is irresistible, as M. Tarde has 

25 



/ 



THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE 

shown; and as M. Fouillee asserts, a nation is 
really united and unified only when its whole 
population thrills at the same appeal and vibrates 
when the same chord is struck. Then there is 
a consciousness of nationality and of true na- 
tional solidarity. Throughout the United States 
there is a unanimous acceptance of the old Eng- 
lish ideals— a liking for energy, a respect for 
character, a belief in equality before the law, and 
an acceptance of individual responsibility. These 
are the ideals which will echo again and again in 
English literature on both shores of the Atlantic, 
as they have echoed so often since King Alfred 
died. " A thousand years are but as yesterday 
when it is past, and as a watch in the night." 
(1901) 



26 



II 



THE FUTURE OF THE 
LANGUAGE 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

TWO apparently contradictory tendencies are 
to-day visible. One of them is revealed by 
our increasing interest in the less important 
languages and in the more important dia- 
lects. The other is to be seen in the immense 
expansion of the several peoples using the three 
or four most widely spoken European tongues, 
an expansion rapidly giving them a supremacy 
which renders hopeless any attempt of the less 
important European languages ever to equal them. 
(It may be noted now once for all that in this 
paper only the Indo-European languages are taken 
into account, altho Arabic did succeed for a while 
in making itself the chief tongue of the Mediter- 
ranean basin, overrunning Sicily and even thrust- 
ing itself up into Spain, and altho Chinese may 
have a fateful expansion in the dark future.) 

As an instance of the first of the two conflict- 
ing tendencies, we have in France the movement 
of the felibres to revive Provencal, and to make 
it again a fit vehicle for poetry. We have in 
29 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

Norway an effort to differentiate written Nor- 
wegian from the Danish, which has hitherto been 
accepted as the standard speech of all Scandi- 
navian authors. We have in Belgium an in- 
creasing resistance to French, which is the official 
tongue, and an attempt arbitrarily to resuscitate 
the Flemish dialect. We have in Switzerland a 
desire to keep alive the primitive and moribund 
Romansh. We have in North Britain a demand 
for at least a professorship of broad Scots. We 
see also that, among the languages of the smaller 
nations, neither Dutch nor Portuguese shows any 
symptoms of diminishing vitality, while Ruma- 
nian has been suddenly encouraged by the political 
independence of the people speaking it. 

All this is curious and interesting; and yet at 
the very period when these developments are in 
progress, other influences are at work on behalf 
of the languages of the greater races. The de- 
velopments noted above are largely the work 
of scholars and of students; they aie the arti- 
ficial products of provincial pride; and they 
are destined to defeat by forces as invincible as 
those of nature itself In their different degrees 
Provencal and Flemish are struggling for exis- 
tence against French; but French itself is not 
gaining in its old rivalry with English and with 
German. 

At the end of the seventeenth century French 
30 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

was the language of diplomacy ; it was the speech 
of the courts of Europe; it was the one modern 
tongue an educated man in England or in Ger- 
many, in Spain or in Italy, needed to acquire. 
As Latin had been the world-language in the 
days of the Empire, so French bade fair to be the 
world-language in the days when all the parts 
of the earth should be bound together by the 
bands of commerce and finance. In the eigh- 
teenth century the supremacy of French was still 
indisputable; but in the nineteenth century it 
disappeared. And, unless all calculations of 
probability fail us, somewhere in the twentieth 
century French will have fallen from the first 
place to the fifth, just below Spanish, just above 
Italian, and far, far beneath English and Russian 
and German. 

It was the social instinct of the French which 
made their language so neat, so apt for epigram 
and compliment, so admirable and so adequate for 
criticism ; and it was the energy of the English- 
speaking peoples, their individuality, their inde- 
pendence, which made our language so sturdy, 
so vigorous, so powerful. 

An excess of the social instinct it is which has 
kept the French at home, close to the borders of 
France, and which has thus restricted the expan- 
sion of their language, while it is also an excess 
of the energy of our stock that has scattered Eng- 
31 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

lish all over the world, on every shore of all the 
seven seas. And now that the nineteenth cen- 
tury has drawn to an end, if we can guess at the 
future from our acquaintance with the past, we 
are justified in believing that the world-language 
at the end of the twentieth century— should any 
one tongue succeed in winning universal accep- 
tance—will be English. If it is not English, then 
it will not be German or Spanish or French; it 
will be Russian. 

This attempt to foretell the future is not a ran- 
dom venture or a reckless brag; it is based on a 
comparison of the number of people speaking the 
different European languages at different periods. 
At my request Mr. N. I. Stone, of the School of 
Political Science of Columbia University, made an 
examination of the statistics, in so far as they 
are obtainable. The figures are rarely absolutely 
trustworthy before the nineteenth century— in- 
deed, they are sometimes little better than guess- 
work. Yet they are approximately accurate, and 
they will serve fairly well for purposes of com- 
parison. They make plain the way in which one 
language has gained on another in the past; and 
they afford material for us to hazard a prediction 
as to the languages likely to gain most in the 
immediate future. 

In the fourteenth century the population of 
France was about ten millions, and that of the 
32 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

British Isles probably less than four millions. In 
both territories there were certainly many who 
did not speak the chief language; yet the pro- 
portion of those who spoke French to those who 
spoke English was at least ten to four. 

Toward the end of the fifteenth century the 
British Isles still had less than four millions, while 
France had more than twelve millions. At this 
same period Italy had a few more than nine mil- 
lions, and Spain a few less, while the Germans 
(including always the Austrians who spoke Ger- 
man) were about ten millions. 

Coming toward the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, we find six millions in the British Isles, 
more than fourteen millions in France and in the 
French-speaking portions of the adjacent coun- 
tries, and more than ten millions in Italy. The 
Russians then numbered nearly four millions and 
a half— only a million and a half less than the 
British. 

At the very end of the seventeenth century the 
number of those speaking English was nearly 
eight millions and a half — most of them still in 
the British Isles, but some of them already de- 
parted into the colonies in America and else- 
where. The number of those speaking French 
was twenty millions, of those speaking Italian 
a few less than twelve millions, and of those 
speaking Russian about fifteen millions. Those 
33 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

Speaking Spanish were chiefly at home in the 
Iberian peninsula, but not a few were in the colo- 
nies in America: they amounted to about eight 
millions in all, the mother-country having wasted 
her people in ruinous wars. 

At the very end of the eighteenth century 
we find the English-speaking peoples on both 
shores of the Atlantic swollen to twenty-two 
millions, having nearly trebled in a hundred 
years, while the French had added only a third 
to their population, amounting in all to a few 
more than twenty-seven millions. The Germans 
were about thirty-three millions, having passed 
the French; and the Italians were a few more 
than thirteen millions, having increased very 
slowly. Neither Germans nor Italians had as 
yet been able either to achieve unity for them- 
selves or to found colonies elsewhere. The 
Spanish, including their pure-blooded colonists, 
numbered perhaps ten millions. The Russians 
had increased to twenty-five millions, the 
boundaries of their empire having been widely 
extended. 

The nineteenth century was a period of unex- 
ampled expansion for the English-speaking race, 
who have spread to India, to Australia, and to 
Africa, besides filling up the western parts of the 
United States; they now number probably be- 
tween a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred 
34 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

and thirty millions. The Russians have also 
pushed their borders across Asia, and they also 
show an immense increase, now numbering about 
a hundred and thirty millions, altho probably a 
very large proportion of their conglomerate 
population does not yet speak Russian. The 
Germans have supplied millions of immigrants to 
the United States, and thousands of expatriated 
traders to all the great cities of the world; and in 
spite of this loss they now number about seventy 
millions (including, as before, the German por- 
tions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy). The 
Spanish-speaking peoples in the old world and 
the new are about forty-two millions, not half 
of them being in Spain itself. 

The French lag far behind in this multiplica- 
tion; they number now a few more than forty 
millions, including those Belgians and Swiss who 
have French for their mother-tongue. The rela- 
tive loss of the French can best be shown by a 
comparison with the English after an interval of 
five hundred years. In the fourteenth century, as 
we have seen, those who spoke French were to 
those who spoke English as ten to four; in the 
nineteenth century those who speak English are 
to those who speak French as one hundred and 
thirty to forty. In other words, the French dur- 
ing five centuries have increased fourfold, while 
the English have multiplied more than thirtyfold. 

35 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

French is still the language most frequently 
employed by diplomatists; it is still the tongue in 
which educated men of differing nationalities 
are most likely to be able to converse with each 
other. But its supremacy has departed forever. 
It has long been fighting a losing battle. Its 
hope of becoming the world-language of the 
future vanished, never to reappear, when Clive 
grasped India and when Wolfe defeated Mont- 
calm. At a brief interval the French let slip 
their final chances of holding either the east or 
the west. 

The English-speaking peoples and the Russians 
have entered into the inheritance which the 
French have renounced. The future is theirs, 
for they are ready to go forth and subdue the 
waste places of the earth. They are the great 
civilizing forces of the twentieth century, each 
in its own way and each in its own degree. 
The Russians have revealed a remarkable 
faculty of assimilation, and have taken over the 
wild tribes of the east, which they are slowly 
starting along the path of progress. The Eng- 
lish — by which I mean always the peoples who 
speak the English language — have possessed 
themselves of North America and of South Africa 
and of Australia; and there is no sign yet visible 
of any lack of energy or of any decrease of vigor 
in the branches of this hardy and prolific stock. 
36 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

At the rate of increase of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the end of the twentieth century will find 
eight hundred and forty millions speaking Eng- 
lish and five hundred millions speaking Russian, 
while those who speak German will be one hun- 
dred and thirty millions and those who speak 
French perhaps sixty millions. But it is very 
unlikely that the rate of increase in the twentieth 
century will be what it was in the nineteenth. 
The extraordinary expansion of the United States 
is the salient phenomenon of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; and it is doubtfully possible and certainly 
improbable that any such expansion can take 
place in the twentieth century, even in South 
Africa. On the other hand, the building of the 
Siberian railroad may open to the Russians an 
outlet for the overflow of their population not 
unlike that offered to the English by the opening 
of the middle west of the United States. The 
outpouring of Germans, hitherto directed chiefly 
to the United States (where they have been taught 
to speak English), may perhaps hereafter be 
diverted to German colonies, where the native 
tongue will be cherished. 

Thus it seems likely that, while the estimate 
for the year 2000 of one hundred and thirty mil- 
lion Germans is none too large, that of five hun- 
dred million Russians is perhaps too small, and 
that of eight hundred and fifty millions for the 
37 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

English-Speaking peoples is probably highly in- 
flated. What, however, we have no reasonable 
right to doubt is that German will be a bad third, 
as French will be a bad fourth ; and that the Eng- 
lish language and the Russian will stand far at 
the head of the list, one all-powerful in the west 
and the other all-powerful in the east. Which 
of them will prevail against the other in the 
twenty-first century no man can now foretell, 
nor can he get any help from ' statistics. 

The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by 
any inspection of figures, for it will turn not so 
much on mere numbers — altho the possession 
of these will be an immense advantage: it will 
be decided rather by the race-characteristics of 
the two stocks when thrust into irresistible 
opposition. The manners and customs of the 
people who speak Russian and of the peoples 
who speak English, their physical strength and 
their vitality, their ideals, social and political — 
all these things will be the decisive factors in the 
final combat. Whether Russian or English shall 
be the world-language of the future depends not 
on the language itself and its merits and demer- 
its, but on the sturdiness of those v/ho shall then 
speak it, on their strength of will, on their power 
of organization, on their readiness to sacrifice 
themselves for the common cause, and on their 
fidelity to their ideals. 

}8 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

Russian is a beautiful language, so those say 
who know it best: it is fresh and vigorous, as 
might be expected in a speech the literature of 
which is not yet old; it is also as clear and as 
direct as French. But it has one insuperable 
disadvantage: its grammar is as primitive and 
as complex as the grammar of German or the 
grammar of Greek. The verb has an elaborate 
conjugation, the noun an elaborate declension, 
the adjective an elaborate method of agreement 
in gender, number, and case. 

Now English is fortunate in having discarded 
nearly all this primitive machinery, which is 
always a sign of linguistic immaturity. The 
English language has shed almost all its un- 
necessary complications; it has advanced from 
complexity toward simplicity, while Russian 
still lingers in its unreformed condition of arbi- 
trary elaboration. One objection, it may be 
noted, to Volapuk, which a German scholar 
kindly invented as the world-language of the 
future, was that its grammar was of this primi- 
tive and complicated type. 

In these days of the printing-press and of the 
schoolmaster any radical modification of the 
mother-tongue is increasingly difficult, so that it 
is highly improbable that Russian can now ever 
shake off these grammatical encumbrances that 
really unfit it for use as a world-language to be 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

acquired by all men. Russian is one of the most 
backward of modern languages in its progress 
toward grammatical simplicity; and English is 
one of the most forward. Italian is also a lan- 
guage which had the good fortune partly to re- 
form its grammar before the invention of printing 
made the operation almost impossible; and Ital- 
ian is like English in that it is a very easy lan- 
guage to learn by word of mouth, as the rules of 
grammar we must needs obey are very few, 
— tho in this respect English is superior even to 
Italian. If English is hard to learn when it is 
taught by the eye instead of the ear, this is be- 
cause of our cumbersome and antiquated spelling; 
here the Italian is far better off than the English. 

Indeed, it is not a little strange that the English 
language, which is one of the most advanced in 
grammatical simplicity, is one of the most belated 
in orthographic simplicity. In no other modern 
language is the system of spelling — if system 
that can be called which has no rule or reason — 
more arbitrary and more chaotic than in English ; 
and no other peculiarity of our language does 
more to retard its diffusion than its wantonly 
foolish orthography. 

Probably much of the violent opposition to the 
simplification of our spelling is due to the fanatic 
zeal of the phonetic reformers, who have fright- 
ened away all the timid respecters of tradition by 
40 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

their rash insistence upon the immediate adoption 
of some brand-new and comprehensive scheme. 
The English-speaking peoples are essentially con- 
servative and unfailingly opportunist; they abhor 
all radical remedies. They are wont to remove 
ancient abuses piecemeal, and not root and 
branch. The most they can be got to do in the 
immediate future is to follow the example of 
the Italians, and to lop off gradually the most 
flagrant inconsistencies and absurdities of our 
present spelling, here a little and there a little, 
going forward hesitatingly, but never stopping. 

In this good work of injecting a little more 
sense into our orthography, as in the other good 
work of still further simplifying our grammar as 
occasion serves and opportunity offers, we Amer- 
icans may have to take the lead. The English 
language is ours by inheritance, and our interest 
in it is as deep and as wide as that of our British 
cousins. As Mark Twain has put it, with his 
customary shrewdness, it is '' the King's Eng- 
lish " no longer, for it has gone into the hands 
of a company, and a majority of the stock is held 
on our side of the Atlantic. 

We Americans must awake to a sense of our 
responsibility as the chief of the English-speaking 
peoples. The tie that binds the British colonies 
to the British crown is strong only because it is 
loose; and in Australia and in Canada the condi- 
41 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

tions of life resemble those of the United States 
rather than those of Great Britain. The British 
Isles are the birthplace of our race, but they 
no longer contain the most important branch 
of the English-speaking peoples. On both 
sides of the Atlantic, and afar in the Pacific also, 
and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, are 
''the subjects of King Shakspere," the students 
of Chaucer and Dryden, the readers of Scott and 
Thackeray and Hawthorne; but most of them, 
or at least the largest single group, will be in the 
United States at the end of the twentieth century, 
as they are at the end of the nineteenth. 

No one has more clearly seen the essential 
unity of the English-speaking race, and no one 
has more accurately stated the relation of the 
American branch of this race to the British branch, 
than the late John Richard Green. In his chap- 
ter on the independence of America, he recorded 
the fact that since 1776 "the life of the English 
people has flowed not in one current, but in 
two; and while the older has shown little sign 
of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a 
greatness which has changed the face of the 
world. In wealth and material energy, as in 
numbers, it far surpasses the mother-country 
from which it sprang. It is already the main 
branch of the English people; and in the days 
that are at hand the main current of that people's 
42 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

history must run along the channel, not of the 
Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and 
the Mississippi." 

When English becomes the world-language, — 
if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of 
honor and usefulness, — it will be the English lan- 
guage as it is spoken by all the branches of the 
English race, no doubt; but the dominant influ- 
ence in deciding what the future of that language 
shall be must come from the United States. The 
English of the future will be the English that we 
shall use here in the United States; and it is for 
us to hand it down to our children fitted for the 
service it is to render. 

This task is ours, not to be undertaken boast- 
fully or vaingloriously or in any spirit of provin- 
cial self-assertion, on the one hand, or of colonial 
self-depreciation on the other, but with a full 
sense of the burden imposed upon us and of the 
privilege that accompanies it. It is our duty to 
do what we can to keep our English speech fresh 
and vigorous, to help it draw new life and power 
from every proper source, to resist all the attempts 
of pedants to cramp it and restrain its healthy 
growth, and to urge along the simplification of its 
grammar and its orthography, so that it shall be 
ready against the day when it is really a world- 
language. 

(1898) 

43 



Ill 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN 
THE UNITED STATES 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN 
THE UNITED STATES 

WHEN Benjamin Franklin was in England 
in 1760, he received a letter from David 
Hume commenting on the style of an essay of 
his writing and on his choice of words; and in 
his reply Franklin modestly thanked his friend 
for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his 
hope that we Americans would always " make 
the best English of this island our standard." 
And yet when France acknowledged the inde- 
pendence of the United States in 1778 and Frank- 
lin was sent to Paris as our minister, Congress 
duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies 
to be observed in doing business with foreign 
countries, and finally resolved that " all speeches 
or communications may, if the public ministers 
choose it, be in the language of their respective 
countries; and all replies or answers shall be in 
the language of the United States." 

What is *'the language of the United States "? 
Is it " the best English " of Great Britain, as 
47 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Franklin hoped it would always be ? Franklin 
was unusually far-sighted, but even he could 
not foresee what is perhaps the most extraordi- 
nary event of the nineteenth century,— an era 
abounding in the extraordinary,— the marvelous 
spread and immense expansion of the English 
language. It is not only along the banks of the 
Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that 
children are now losing irrecoverable hours on the 
many absurdities of English orthography: a like 
wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores 
of the Hudson, of the Mississippi, and of the 
Columbia, while the sam.e A B C's are parroted 
by the little ones of those who live where the 
Ganges rolls down its yellow sand and of those 
who dwell in the great island which is almost 
riverless. No parallel can be found in history 
for this sudden spreading out of the English 
language in the past hundred years— not even the 
diffusion of Latin during the century when the 
rule of Rome was most widely extended. 

Among the scattered millions who now employ 
our common speech, in England itself, in Scot- 
land, Wales, and Ireland, in the United States and 
Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and 
in South Africa, there is no stronger bond of 
union than the language itself. There is no like- 
lihood that any political association will ever be 
sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

more independent colonies to the mother-coun- 
try is loose enough now, even if it is never 
further relaxed; and less than half of those 
who have English for their mother-tongue owe 
any allegiance whatever to England. The Eng- 
lish-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire 
are apparently fewer than the inhabitants of 
the American republic; and the population of the 
United Kingdom itself is only a little more than 
half the population of the United States. 

To set down these facts is to point out that 
the English language is no longer a personal 
possession of the people of England. The 
power of the head of the British Empire over 
what used to be called the " King's English " is 
now as little recognized as his power over what 
used to be called the ''king's evil." We may 
regret that this is the case, or we may rejoice at 
it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And 
thus we are face to face with more than one very 
interesting question. What is going to become 
of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad 
and freed from all control by a central authority 
and exposed to all sorts of alien influences ? Is 
it bound to become corrupted and to sink from its 
high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter 
of barbarously fashioned verbal novelties ? What, 
more especially, is going to be the future of the 
English language here in America ? Must we fear 
49 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

the dread possibility that the speech of the peo- 
ples on the opposite sides of the Western Ocean 
will diverge at last until the English language 
will divide into two branches, those who speak 
British being hardly able to understand those 
who speak American, and those who speak 
American being hardly able to understand those 
who speak British ? Mark Twain is a humorist, 
it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has 
abundant common sense; and it was Mark 
Twain who declared a score of years ago that he 
spoke the "American language." 

The science of linguistics is among the young- 
est, and yet it has already established itself so 
firmily on the solid ground of ascertained truth 
that it has been able to overthrow with ease one 
and another of the many theories which were ac- 
cepted without question before it came into being. 
For example, time was— and the time is not 
so very remote, it may be remarked— time was 
when the little group of more or less highly edu- 
cated men who were at the center of authority 
in the capital of any nation had no doubt what- 
soever as to the superiority of their way of speak- 
ing their own language over the manner in 
which it might be spoken by the vast majority 
of their fellow-citizens deprived of the advan- 
tages of a court training. This little group set 
the standard of speech; and the standard they 
50 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

set was accepted as final and not to be tampered 
with under penalty of punishment for the crime 
of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence 
from the customs of speaking and writing they 
themselves cherished was due to ignorance and 
probably to obstinacy. They believed that the 
court dialect which they had been brought up to 
use was the only true and original form of the 
language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross 
impropriety every usage and every phrase with 
which they themselves did not happen to be 
familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole 
validity of their personal habits of speech they 
had no need for self-assertion, since it never en- 
tered into the head of any one not belonging to 
the court circle to question for a second the 
position thus tacitly declared. 

Yet if modern methods of research ^ave made 
anything whatever indisputable in the history of 
human speech, they have 'completely disproved 
the assumption which underlies this implicit 
claim of the courtiers. We know now that the 
urban dialect is not the original language t»f which 
the rural dialects are but so many corruptions. 
We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are 
often really closer to the original tongue than the 
urban dialect; and that the urban dialect itself 
was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes 
its preeminence rarely to any superiority of its 
51 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

own over its rivals, but rather to the fact that it 
chanced to be the speech of a knot of men more 
masterful than the inhabitants of any other vil- 
lage, and able therefore to expand their village to 
a town and at last to a city, which imposed its 
rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants 
of these being by that time forgetful that they 
had once striven with it on almost equal terms. 
Generally it is the stability given by political pre- 
eminence which leads to the development of a 
literature, without which no dialect can retain its 
linguistic supremacy. 

When the sturdy warriors whose homes were 
clustered on one or another of the seven hills of 
Rome began to makealliances and conquests, they 
rendered possible the future development of their 
rough Italic into the Latin language which has 
left its mark on almost every modern European 
tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans, 
who possessed dialects of an equal antiquity and 
of an equal possibility of improvement, could not 
but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought, 
perforce, to bring their vocabulary and their syn- 
tax into conformity with that of the men who 
had shown themselves more powerful. Thus 
one of the Italic dialects was singled out by for- 
tune for an extraordinary future, and the other 
Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho 
they were each of them as old as the Roman and 
52 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

as available for development. These other dia- 
lects have even suffered the ignominy of being 
supposed to be corruptions of their triumphant 
brother. 

The French philologist Darmesteter concisely 
explained the stages of this development of one 
local speech at the expense of its neighbors. As 
it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow. 
A local speech thus neglected is a patois; and a 
local speech which 'achieves the dignity of litera- 
ture is a dialect. These written tongues spread 
on all sides and impose themselves on the sur- 
rounding population as morenoble than the patois. 
Thus a linguistic province is created, and its dia- 
lect tends constantly to crush out the various 
patois once freely used within its boundaries. 

In time one of these provinces becomes politi- 
cally more powerful than the others and extends 
its rule over one after another of them. As it 
does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the 
provinces as the official tongue, and it tends 'con- 
stantly to crush out these other dialects, as they 
had tended constantly to crush out the various 
patois. Thus the local speech of the population 
of the tiny island in the Seine, which is the 
nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to the 
dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech 
of each of the neighboring villages sank into a 
patois— altho originally it was in no wise in- 
5y 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

ferior. In the course of centuries Paris became 
the capital of France, and its provincial dialect 
became the official language of the kingdom. 
When the kings of France extended their rule 
over Normandy and over Burgundy and over 
Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in impos- 
ing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces 
as superior; and in time the Norman dialect and 
the Burgundian and the Provencal were ousted. 

The dialect of the province in which the king 
dwelt and in which the business of governing 
was carried on, could not but dispossess the dia- 
lects of all the other provinces; and thus the 
French language, as we know it now, was once 
only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was ap- 
parently no linguistic inferiority of the langue 
d'oc to the langue Soil ; and the reasons for the 
dominion of the one and the decadence of the 
other are purely political. Of course, as the 
Parisian dialect grew and spread itself, it was 
enriched by locutions from the other provincial 
dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of 
many of its grammatical complexities not com- 
mon to the most of the others. 

The French language was developed from one 
particular provincial dialect probably no better 
adapted for improvement than any one of half a 
dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of 
precision infinitely finer than any of its pristine 
54 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

rivals, since they had none of them the good for- 
tune to be chosen for development. But the 
patois of the peasant of Normandy or of Brittany, 
however inadequate it may be as a means of 
expression for a modern man, is not a corruption 
of French, any more than Doric is a corruption 
of Attic Greek. It is rather in the position of a 
twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fel- 
low, more adroit in getting the good will of their 
parents. It was the literary skill of the Athe- 
nians themselves, and not the superiority of the 
original dialect, that makes us think of Attic 
as the only genuine Greek, just as it was the 
prowess of the Romans in war and their power 
of governing which raised their provincial dialect 
into the language of Italy, and then carried it 
triumphant to every shore of the Mediterranean. 
The history of the development of the English 
language is like the history of the development 
of Greek and Latin and French; and the English 
language as we speak it to-day is a growth from, 
the Midland dialect, itself the victor of a struggle 
for survivorship with the Southern and Northern 
dialects. *' With the accession of the royal house 
of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England," so 
Professor Lounsbury tells us, "the dialect of 
Wessex had become the cultivated language of 
the whole people— the language in which books 
were written and laws were published." But 
55 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

when the Norman conquest came, altho, to 
quote from Professor Lounsbury again, "the 
native tongue continued to be spoken by the 
great majority of the population, it went out of 
use as the language of high culture, " and "the edu- 
cated classes, whether lay or ecclesiastical, pre- 
ferred to write either in Latin or in French— the 
latter steadily tending more and more to become 
the language of literature as well as of polite 
society. " And as a result of this the West-Saxon 
had to drop to the low level of the other dialects; 
"it had no longer any preeminence of its own." 
There was in England from the twelfth to the 
fourteenth centuries no national language, but 
every one was free to use with tongue and pen 
his own local speech, altho three provincial 
dialects existed, " each possessing a literature of 
its own and each seemingly having about the 
same chance to be adopted as the representative 
national speech." 

These three dialects were the Southern (which 
was the descendant of Wessex, once on the way 
to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland 
(which had the sole advantage that it was a com- 
promise between its neighbors to the north and 
the south). London was situated in the region 
of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore " the 
tongue mainly employed at the court" when 
French slowly ceased to be the language of the 
5^ 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Upper classes. As might be expected in those 
days before the printing-press and the spelling- 
book imposed uniformity, the Midland dialect 
was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern 
counties from the way it was spoken in the 
Western counties of the region. London was in 
the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and 
London was the capital. Probably because the 
speech of the Eastern division of the Midland dia- 
lect was the speech of the capital, it was used as 
the vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court 
—who happened also to be a great poet and a 
great literary artist. Just as Dante's choice of his 
native Tuscan dialect controlled the future de- 
velopment of Italian, so Chaucer's choice con- 
trolled the future development of EngHsh. It 
was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares, 
" who first showed to all men the resources of 
the language, its capacity of representmg with 
discrimination all shades of human thought and 
of conveying with power all manifestations of 
human feeling." 

The same writer tells us that *' the cultivated 
English language, in which nearly all English 
literature of value has been written, sprang 
directly from the East-Midland division of the 
Midland dialect, and especially from the variety 
of the East-Midland which was spoken at Lon- 
don and the region immediately to the north of 
57 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

it." That this magnificent opportunity came to 
the London dialect was not due to any superiority 
it had over any other variety of the Midland dia- 
lect: it was due to the single fact that it was the 
speech of the capital— just as the dialect of the 
Ile-de-France in like manner served as the stem 
from which the cultivated French language 
sprang. The Parisian dialect flourished and im- 
posed itself on all sides ; within the present limits 
of France it choked out the other local dialects, 
even the soft and lovely Provencal; and beyond 
the boundaries of the country it was accepted 
in Belgium and in Sv/itzerland. 

So the dialect of London has gone on growing 
and refining and enriching itself as the people 
who spoke it extended their borders and passed 
over the wide waters and won their way to far 
countries, until to-day it serves not merely for the 
cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of Mon- 
tana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is ade- 
quate for the various needs of the Scotch philoso- 
pher and of the American humorist ; it is employed 
by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the 
governor of Alaska, and the general in command 
over the Philippines. In the course of some six 
centuries the dialect of a little town on the 
Thames has become the mother-tongue of mil- 
lions and millions of people scattered broadcast 
over the face of the earth. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

If the Norman conquest had not taken place 
the history of the English race would be very 
different, and the English language would not be 
what it is, since it would have had for its root 
the Wessex variety of the Southern dialect. But 
the Norman conquest did take place, and the 
English language has for its root the Eastern 
division of the Midland dialect. The Norman 
conquest it was which brought the modest but 
vigorous young English tongue into close contact 
with the more highly cultivated French. The 
French spoken in England was rather the Nor- 
man dialect than the Parisian (which is the true 
root of modern French), and whatever slight in- 
fluence English may have had upon it does not 
matter now, for it was destined to a certain 
death. But this Norman-French enlarged the 
plastic English speech against which it was press- 
ing; and English adopted many French words, 
not borrowing them, but making them our own, 
once for all, and not dropping the original English 
word, but keeping both with slight divergence of 
meaning. 

Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that 
we owe the double vocabulary wherein our lan- 
guage surpasses all others. While the frame- 
work of English is Teutonic, we have for many 
things two names, one of Germanic origin and 
one of Romance. Our direct, homely words, 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

that go Straight to our hearts and nestle there— 
these are most of them Teutonic. Our more 
delicate words, subtle in finer shades of mean- 
ing—these often come to us from the Latin 
through the French. The secondary words are 
of Romance origin, and the primary words of 
Germanic. And this— if the digression may here 
be hazarded— is one reason why French poetry 
touches us less than German, the words of the 
former seeming to us remote, not to say sophis- 
ticated, while the words of the latter are akin to 
our own simpler and swifter words. 

One other advantage of the pressure of French 
upon English in the earlier stages of its develop- 
ment, when it was still ductile, was that this 
pressure helped us to our present grammatical 
simplicity. Whenever the political intelligence 
of the inhabitants of the capital of a district 
raises the local dialect to a position of supremacy, 
so that it spreads over the surrounding districts 
and casts their dialects into the shadow, the 
dominant dialect is likely to lose those of its 
grammatical peculiarities not to be found also in 
the other dialects. Whatever is common to 
them all is pretty sure to survive, and what is 
not common may or may not be given up. The 
London dialect, in its development, felt the in- 
fluence, not only of the other division of the 
Midland dialect, and of the two rival dialects, 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

one to the north of it and the other to the south, 
but also of a foreign tongue spoken by all who 
pretended to any degree of culture. This attri- 
tion helped English to shed many minor gram- 
matical complexities still retained by languages 
which had not this fortunate experience in their 
youth. 

Perhaps the late Richard Grant White was 
going a little too far when he asserted that Eng- 
lish was a grammarless tongue; but it cannot be 
denied that English is less infested with gram- 
mar than any other of the great modern languages. 
German, for example, is a most grammarful 
tongue; and Mark Twain has explained to us 
(in ' A Tramp Abroad ') just how elaborate and 
intricate its verbal machinery is; and the Vola- 
puk, which was made in Germany, had the 
syntactical convolutions of its inventor's native 
tongue. 

By its possession of this grammatical com- 
plexity, Volapuk was unfitted for service as a 
world-language. A fortunate coincidence it is 
that English, which is becoming a world-language 
by sheer force of the energy and determination 
of those whose mother-speech it is, should early 
have shed most of these cumbersome and re- 
tarding grammatical devices. The earlier phi- 
lologists were wont to consider this throwing off 
of needless inflections as a symptom of decay. 
6\ 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

The later philologists are coming to recognize it 
as a sign of progress. They are getting to regard 
the unconscious struggle for short-cuts in speech, 
not as degeneration, but rather as regeneration. 
As Krauter asserts, " The dying out of forms and 
sounds is looked upon by the etymologists with 
painful feelings; but no unprejudiced judge will 
be able to see in it anything but a progressive 
victory over lifeless material." And he adds, 
with terse common sense: "Among several 
tools performing equal work, that is the best 
which is the simplest and most handy." This 
brief excerpt from the German scholar is bor- 
rowed here from a paper prepared for the Modern 
Language Association by Professor C. A. Smith, 
in which may be found also a dictum of the Dan- 
ish philologist Jespersen: "The fev/er and 
shorter the forms, the better; the analytic struc- 
ture of modern European languages is so far from 
being a drawback to them that it gives them an 
unimpeachable superiority over the earlier stages 
of the same languages." And it is Jespersen 
who boldly declares that " the so-called full and 
rich forms of the ancient languages are not a 
beauty, but a deformity." 

In other words, language is merely an instru- 
ment for the use of man; and like all other in- 
struments, it had to begin by being far miore 
complicated than is needful. The watch used to 
62 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

have more than a hundred separate parts, and 
now it is made with less than twoscore, losing 
nothing in its efficiency and in precision. Greek 
and German are old-fashioned watches; Italian 
and Danish and English are watches of a later 
style. Of the more prominent modern languages, 
German and Russian are the most backward, 
while English is the most advanced. And the 
end is not yet, for the eternal forces are ever 
working to make our tongue still easier. The 
printing-press is a most powerful agent on the 
side of the past, making progress far more slug- 
gish than it was before books were broadcast ; yet 
the English language is still engaged in sloughing 
off its outworn grammatical skin. Altho in the 
nineteenth century the changes in the structure 
of English have probably been less than in any 
other century of its history, yet there have been 
changes not a few. 

For example, the subjunctive mood is going 
slowly into innocuous desuetude; the stickler for 
grammar, so-called, may protest in vain against 
its disappearance: its days are numbered. It 
serves no useful purpose; it has to be laboriously 
acquired; it is now a matter of rule and not of 
instinct; it is no longer natural: and therefore it 
will inevitably disappear, sooner or later. Care- 
ful investigation has shown that it has already 
been discarded by many even among those who 
63 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

are very careful of their style— some of whom, 
no doubt, would rise promptly to the defense of 
the form they have been discarding uncon- 
sciously. One authority declares that altho the 
form has seemed to survive, it has been empty 
of any distinct meaning since the sixteenth cen- 
tury. 

This is only one of the tendencies observable 
in the nineteenth century; and we may rest as- 
sured that others will become visible in the 
twentieth. But when English is compared with 
German, we cannot help seeing that most of 
this work is done already. Grammar has been 
stripped to the bone in English; and for us who 
have to use the language to-day it is fortunate 
that our remote ancestors, who fashioned it for 
their own use without thought of our needs, 
should have had the same liking we have for the 
simplest possible tool, and that they should have 
cast off, as soon as they could, one and another 
of the grammatical complexities which always 
cumber every language in its earlier stages, and 
most of which still cumber German. In nothing 
is the practical directness of our stock more 
clearly revealed than in this immediate beginning 
upon the arduous task of making the means of 
communication between man and man as easy 
and as direct as possible. Doubly fortunate are 
we that this job was taken up and put through 
64 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

before the invention of printing multiplied the 
inertia of conservatism. 

It was the political supremacy of Paris which 
made the Parisian dialect the standard of French; 
and it was the genius of Dante which made the 
Tuscan dialect the standard of Italian. That the 
London dialect is the standard of English is due 
partly to the political supremacy of the capital 
and partly to the genius of Chaucer. As the 
French are a home-keeping people, Paris has re- 
tained its political supremacy; while the English 
are a venturesome race and have spread abroad 
and split into two great divisions, so that London 
has lost its political supremacy, being the capital 
now only of the less numerous portion of those 
who have English as their mother-tongue. 

It is true, of course, that a very large propor- 
tion of the inhabitants of the United States, how- 
ever independent politically of the great empire 
of which London is the capital, look with affec- 
tion upon the city by the Thames. Their feeling 
toward England is akin to that which led Haw- 
thorne to entitle his record of a sojourn in Eng- 
land * Our Old Home.' The American liking for 
London itself seems to be increasing; and, as 
Lowell once remarked, " We Americans are be- 
ginning to feel that London is the center of the 
races that speak English, very much in the sense 
that Rome was the center of the ancient world." 
65 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

It was at a dinner of the Society of Authors 
that he«said this, and he then added: "I confess 
that I never think of London, which I also con- 
fess I love, without thinking of the palace David 
built, * sitting in the hearing of a hundred streams ' 
—streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity." 

While the London dialect is the stem from 
which the English language has grown, the vo- 
cabulary of the language has never been limited 
by the dialect. It has been enriched by countless 
words and phrases and locutions of one kind or 
another from the other division of the Midland 
dialect and from both the Northern and the 
Southern dialects— just as modern Italian has not 
limited itself to the narrow vocabulary of Flor- 
ence. Yet in the earlier stages of the develop- 
ment of English the language benefited by 
the fact that there was a local standard. The 
attempt of all to assimilate their speech to that 
of the inhabitants of London tended to give uni- 
formity without rigidity. As men came up to 
court they brought with them the best of the 
words and turns of speech peculiar to their own 
dialect; and the language gained by all these 
accretions. 

Shakspere contributed Warwickshire localisms 

not a few, just as Scott procured the acceptance 

of Scotticisms hitherto under a ban. As Spenser 

had gone back to Chaucer, so Keats went to the 

66 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Elizabethans and dug out old words for his own 
use; and William Morris pushed his researches 
farther and brought up words almost pre- 
Chaucerian. Every language in Europe has been 
put under contribution at one time or another for 
one purpose or another. The military vocabu- 
lary, for instance, reveals the former superiority 
of the French, just as the naval vocabulary reveals 
the former superiority of the Dutch. And as 
modern science has extended its conquests, it has 
drawn on Greek for its terms of precision. 

Under this influx of foreign words, old and 
new, the framework of the original London dia- 
lect stands solidly enough, but it is visible only 
to the scholarly specialist in linguistic research. 
But the latest London dialect, the speech of the 
inhabitants of the British capital at the end of 
the nineteenth century, has ceased absolutely to 
serve as a standard. Whatever utility there was 
in the past in accepting as normal English the 
actual living dialect of London has long since 
departed without a protest. No educated Eng- 
lishman any longer thinks of conforming his 
syntax or his vocabulary to the actual living dia- 
lect of London, whether of the court or of the 
slums. Indeed, so far is he from accepting the 
verbal habits of the man in the street as suggest- 
ing a standard for him that he is wont to hold 
them up to ridicule as cockney corruptions. He 
67 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

likes to laugh at the tricks of speech that he 
discovers on the lips of the Londoners, at their 
dropping of their initial /;'s more often than he 
deems proper, and at their more recent substi- 
tution of _>^ for ^— as in "tyke the cyke, lydy." 

The local standard of London has thus been 
disestablished in the course of the centuries sim- 
ply because there was no longer a necessity for 
any local standard. The speech of the capital 
served as the starting-point of the language; and 
in the early days a local standard of usage was 
useful. But now, after English has enjoyed 
a thousand years of growth, a standard so primi- 
tive is not only useless, but it would be very 
injurious. Nor could any other local standard be 
substituted for that of London without manifest 
danger— even if the acceptance of such a standard 
was possible. The peoples that speak English 
are now too widely scattered and their needs are 
too many and too diverse for any local standard 
not to be retarding in its Hmitations. 

To-day the standard of English is to be sought 
not in the actual living dialect of the inhabitants 
of any district or of any country, but in the lan- 
guage itself, in its splendid past and in its mighty 
present. Five hundred years ago, more or less, 
Chaucer sent forth the first masterpieces of Eng- 
lish literature; and in all those five centuries the 
language has never lacked poets and prose- 
68 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

writers who knew its secrets and could bring 
forth its beauties. Each of them has helped to 
make English what it is now; and a study of 
what English has been is all that we need to en- 
able us to see what it will be— and what it should 
be. Any attempt to trammel it by a local stan- 
dard, or by academic restrictions, or by school- 
masters' grammar-rules, is certain to fail. In the 
past, English has shaken itself free of many a 
limitation; and in the present it is insisting on its 
own liberty to take the short-cut whenever that 
enables it to do its work with less waste of time. 
We cannot doubt that in the future it will go on 
in its own way, making itself fitter for the mani- 
fold needs of an expanding race which has the 
unusual characteristic of having lofty ideals while 
being intensely practical. A British poet it was, 
Lord Houghton, who once sent these prophetic 
lines to an American lady: 

That ample speech ! That subtle speech ! 
Apt for the need of all and each ; 
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend 
Wherever human feelings tend. 
Preserve its force ; expand its powers; 
And through the maze of civic life, 
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife, 
Forget not it is yours and ours. 

The English language is the most valuable 
possession of the peoples that speak it, and that 
69 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

have for their chief cities, not London alone, or 
Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and 
Chicago, Calcutta and Bombay, Melbourne and 
Montreal. The. English language is one and in- 
divisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a 
local standard may lead it ever to break up into 
fragmentary dialects. There is really no danger 
now that English will not be uniform in all the 
four quarters of the w^orld, and that it will not 
modify itself as occasion serves. We can already 
detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary; 
but these are only trifles. The steamship and 
the railroad and the telegraph bring the American 
and the Briton and the Australian closer together 
nov/adays than were the users of the Midland 
dialect when Chaucer set forth on his pilgrimage 
to Canterbury; and then there is the printing- 
press, whereby the newspaper and the school- 
book and the works of the dead-and-gone 
masters of our literature bind us together with 
unbreakable links. 

These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary 
—London from Edinburgh, and New York from 
Bombay— are but evidences of the healthy activ- 
ity of our tongue. It is only when it is dead that 
a language ceases to grow. It needs to be con- 
stantly refreshed by new words and phrases as 
the elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to 
be part of Shakspere's good fortune that he came 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

when English was ripe and yet fresh, when there 
was an abundance of words ready to his hand, 
but none of them yet exhausted by hard work. 
So Mr. Howells has recently recorded his feeling 
that any one who now employs English ''to depict 
or to characterize finds the phrases thumbed over 
and worn and blunted with incessant use," and 
experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are 
now and again " reported from the lips of the 
people." 

" From the lips of thepeople" ; —here is a phrase 
that would have sadly shocked a narrow-minded 
scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned 
of yesterday denied— and, indeed, have de- 
nounced as rank heresy— the more learned of 
to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language 
of a people is the spoken word, not the written. 
Language lives on the tongue and in the ear; 
there it was born, and there it grows. Man 
wooed his wife and taught his children and dis- 
cussed with his neighbors for centuries before he 
perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the 
work of the world is done rather by the spoken 
word than by the written. And those who ^re 
doing the work of the world are following the 
example of our remote ancestors who did not 
know how to write; when they feel new needs 
they will make violent efforts to supply those 
needs, devising fresh v/ords put together in 
71 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly. The 
mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments, 
to risk a new locution, to hazard a wrenching of 
an old term to a novel use. The hand that 
writes is always slow to accept the result of these 
attempts to meet a demand in an unauthorized 
way. The spoken language bristles with innova- 
tions, while the written language remains properly 
conservative. Few of these oral babes are viable, 
and fewer still survive; while only now and 
again does one of these verbal foundlings come 
of age and claim citizenship in literature. 

In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our 
grandfathers handed down to us there are solemn 
warnings against neologisms— and neologism 
was a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a 
new word as such. But in the stimulating study 
of certain of the laws of linguistics, which M. 
Breal, one of the foremost of French philologists, 
has called 'Semantics,' we are told that to con- 
demn neologisms absolutely would be most un- 
fortunate and most useless. " Every progress in 
a language is, first of all, the act of an individual, 
and then of a minority, large or small. A land 
where all innovation should be forbidden would 
take from its language all chance of develop- 
ment." And M. Breal points out that language 
must keep on transforming itself with every new 
discovery and invention, with the incessant 
72 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

modification of our manners, of our customs, 
and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work 
on the vocabulary of the future, ignorant and 
learned, authors and artists, the man of the 
world and the man in the street; and even our 
children have a share in this labor, and by no 
means the least. 

Among all these countless candidates for lite- 
rary acceptance, the struggle for existence is very 
fierce, and only the fittest of the new words sur- 
vive. Or, to change the figure, conversation 
might be called the Lower House, where all the 
verbal coinages must have their origin, while 
literature is the Upper House, without whose 
concurrence nothing can be established. And 
the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy ; 
they resist all attempts of which they do not 
approve. In language, as in politics, the power 
of the democratic principle is getting itself more 
widely acknowledged. The people blunders 
more often than not, but it knows its own mind; 
and in the end it has its own way. In language, 
as in politics, we Americans are really conserva- 
tive. We are well aware that we have the right 
to make what change we please, and we know 
better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we 
do not desire to do so. We want no more 
change in our laws or in our language than is 
absolutely necessary. 

73 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

We have modified the common language far 
less than we have modified the common law. 
We have kept alive here many a word and many 
a meaning which was well worthy of preserva- 
tion, and which our kin across the seas had 
permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, 
in his comprehensive volume on ' English Prose,' 
praises American authors for refreshing old 
words by novel combinations. When Mr. W. 
Aldis Wright drew up a glossary of the words, 
phrases, and constructions in the King James 
translation of the Bible and in the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer, which were obsolete in Great Britain 
in the sense that they would no longer naturally 
find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor 
Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of 
these words, phrases, and constructions are not 
now obsolete in the United States, and would 
be used by any American writer without fear 
that he might not be understood. As Lowell 
said, our ancestors " unhappily could bring over 
no English better than Shakspere's, ' and by 
good fortune we have kept alive some of the 
Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our 
trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric 
vigor now rarely to be matched in the street- 
phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his 
living. Ben Jonson would have relished one 
New York phrase that an office-holder gives an 
74 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

office-seeker, **the glad hand and the marble 
heart," and that other which described a former 
favorite comedian as now having "a fur-lined 
voice." 

When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he 
thought that we Americans had already modified 
the English language. British critics, like Dean 
Alford, have often animadverted upon the deteri- 
oration of the language on this side of the Atlan- 
tic. American humorists, like Mark Twain, have 
calmly claimed that the tongue they used was 
not English, but American. It is English as 
Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force and 
a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of 
the language; but in so far as American usage 
differs from British, it was according to the 
former and not according to the latter. But they 
differ in reality very slightly indeed; and what- 
ever divergence there may be is rather in the 
spoken language than in the written. That the 
spoken language should vary is inevitable and 
advantageous, since the more variation is at- 
tempted, the better opportunity the language has 
to freshen up its languishing vocabulary and to 
reinvigorate itself. That the written language 
should widely vary would be the greatest of 
misfortunes. 

Of this there is now no danger whatever, and 
never has been. The settlement of the United 
15 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

States took place after the invention of printing; 
and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a 
new dialect nowadays. The disestablishment 
of the local standard of London leaves English 
free to develop according to its own laws and its 
own logic. There is no longer any weight of 
authority to be given to contemporary British 
usage over contemporary American usage— ex- 
cept in so far as the British branch of English 
literature is more resplendent with names of high 
renown than the American branch. That this was 
the case in the nineteenth century— that the 
British poets and prose-writers outnumber and 
outvalue the American— must be admitted at 
once; that it will be the case throughout the 
twentieth century may be doubted. And when- 
ever the poets and prose-writers of the American 
branch of English literature are superior in num- 
ber and in power to those of the British branch, 
then there can be no doubt as to where the 
weight of authority will lie. The shifting of the 
center of power will take place unconsciously; 
and the development of English will go on just 
the same after it takes place as it is going on 
now. The conservative forces are in no danger 
of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether 
in the United States or in Great Britain or in any 
of her colonial dependencies. 

Perhaps the principle which will govern can 
76 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES 

best be stated in another quotation from M. 
Breal: "The limit within which the right to in- 
novate stops is not fixed by any idea of ' purity ' 
(which can always be contested) ; it is fixed by 
the need we have to keep in contact with the 
thought of those who have preceded us. The 
more considerable the literary past of a people, 
the more this need makes itself felt as a duty, as 
a condition of dignity and force." And there is 
no sign that either the American or the British 
half of those who have our language for a mother- 
tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to 
the literary past of English literature, that most 
magnificent heritage— the birthright of both 
of us. 
(1899) 



77 



IV 

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT 
BRITAIN 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

THERE is a wide gap between the proverb 
asserting that "figures never lie" and the 
opinion expressed now and again by experts that 
nothing can be more mendacious than statistics 
misapplied; and the truth seems to lie between 
these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is 
the backbone of history, so a statement of fact 
can be made terser and more convincing if the 
figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we 
wish to perceive the change of the relative posi- 
tion of Great Britain and the United States in the 
course of the centuries, nothing can help us bet- 
ter to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case 
than a comparison of the population of the two 
countries at various periods. 

In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and 
Ireland numbered between eight and nine mil- 
lions, while the inhabitants of what is now the 
United States were, perhaps, a scant three hun- 
dred thousand. In 1900, the people of the Brit- 
ish Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

millions more or less, and the people of the 
United States are almost exactly twice as many, 
being about seventy-five millions. To project a 
statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazar- 
dous proceeding; and no man can now guess at 
the probable population either of the United 
Kingdom or of the United States in the year 
2000; but as the rate of increase is far larger in 
America than in England, there is little risk in 
suggesting that a hundred years from now the 
population of the American repubhc will be at 
least four or five times as large as that of the 
British monarchy. 

Just as the center of population of the United 
States has been steadily working its way west- 
ward, having been in 1800 in Maryland and 
being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of 
population of the English-speaking race has been 
steadily moving toward the Occident. Just as 
the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies 
during the nineteenth century, so will the second 
of them have to cross the Atlantic during the 
twentieth century. Whether this latter change 
shall take place early in the century or late, is 
not important; one day or another it will take 
place, assuredly. 

Inevitably it will be accompanied or speedily 
followed by another change of almost equal sig- 
nificance. London sooner or later will cease to 
82 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

be the literary center of the English-speaking 
race. For many centuries the town by the 
Thames has been the heart of English literature; 
and there are now visible very few signs that the 
days of its supremacy are numbered. Even in 
the United States to-day the old colonial attitude, 
not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to 
be as well acquainted with second-rate British 
authors as the British are with American authors 
of the first rank. Yet it is not without signifi- 
cance that at the close of the nineteenth century 
the two most widely known writers of the lan- 
guage should be one of them an American citizen 
and the other a British colonial, owing no local 
allegiance to London— Mark Twain and Rudyard 
Kipling. 

The disestablishment of London as the literary 
center of English will be retarded by various cir- 
cumstances. Only very reluctantly is a tradition 
of preeminence overthrown when consecrated 
by the centuries. The conditions of existence in 
England are likely long to continue to be more 
favorable to literary productivity than are the 
conditions in America. In a new country litera- 
ture finds an eager rival in life itself, with all its 
myriad opportunities for self-expression. No 
paradox is it to say that more than one American 
bard may have preferred to build his epic in steel 
or in stone rather than in words. The creative 
83 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

imagination has outlets here denied it in a long- 
settled community, residing tranquilly in a little 
island, where even the decorous landscape seems 
to belong to the Established Church. But the 
Eastern States are already, many of them, as or- 
derly and as placid as Great Britain has been for a 
century. The conditions in England and in Amer- 
ica are constantly tending toward equalization. 

A time will come, and probably long before 
the close of the twentieth century, when there 
will be in the United States not only several 
times as many people as there are in the British 
Isles, but also far more literary activity. Sooner 
or later most of the leading authors of English 
literature will be American and not British in 
their training, in their thought, in their ideals. 
That is to say, the British in the middle of the 
twentieth century will hold to the Americans 
about the same position that the Americans 
held toward the British in the middle of the 
nineteenth century. The group of American 
authors between 1840 and i860 contained Irving 
and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne, Longfel- 
low and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau. 
These are names endeared to us and highly im- 
portant to us, and not to be neglected in any 
consideration of English literature; but it is fool- 
ish for an American to seek to set them up as 
the equal of the British group flourishing during 
84 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

the same score of years. So in the middle of the 
twentieth century the British group will probably 
not lack striking individualities; but, as a whole, 
it will probably be surpassed by the American 
group. The largest portion of the men of letters 
who use English to express themselves, as well 
as the largest body of the English-speaking race, 
will have its residence on the western shore of 
the Western Ocean. 

What will then happen to the English lan- 
guage in England when England awakens to the 
fact that the center of the English-speaking race 
is no longer within the borders of the little 
island ? Will the speech of the British sink into 
dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely 
stamp out their undue local divergences from the 
normal English of the main body of the users of 
the language in the United States ? Will they 
frankly accept the inevitable ? Will they face 
the facts as they are ? Will they follow the lead 
of the Americans when we shall have the leader- 
ship of the language, as the Americans followed 
their lead when they had it ? Or will they insist 
on an arbitrary independence, which can have 
only one result— the splitting off of the British 
branch of our speech from the main stem of the 
language ? To ask these questions is to project 
an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation 
is not without an interest of its own. And 
85 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

altho it is difficult to decide so far in advance 
of the event, yet we have now^ some of the 
material on which to base a judgment as to what 
is likely to happen. 

Of course, the question is not one to be 
answered offhand; and not a few arguments 
could be brought forward in support of the 
opinion that the British speech of the future is 
likely to separate itself from the main body of 
English as then spoken in this country. In the 
first place, England, altho it has already ceased 
to be the most populous of the countries using 
English, will still be the senior partner of the 
great trading-company known as the British 
Empire. That the British Empire may be dis- 
solved is possible, no doubt. The Australian 
colonies have federated; and having formed a 
strong union of their own, they may prefer to 
stand alone. South Africa may follow the ex- 
ample of Australia. India may arise in the might 
of her millions and cast out its English rulers. 
Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the 
greater American republic. But each of these 
things is improbable; and that they should all 
come to pass is practically inconceivable. All 
signs now seem to point not only to a continu- 
ance of the British Empire, but also to its steady 
expansion. London is likely long to be the cap- 
ital of an empire upon which the sun never sets, 
86 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

an empire inhabited by men of every color and 
every creed and every language. For these men 
English must serve as the means of communica- 
tion one with another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer 
with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck. 

That this will put a strain on the language is 
indisputable. Wherever any tongue serves as a 
lingua franca for men of various stocks, there 
is an immediate tendency toward corruption. 
There is a constant pressure to simplify and to 
lop off and to reduce to the bare elements. The 
Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example 
of what may befall a noble language when it is 
enslaved to serve many masters, ignorant of its 
history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling's 
earliest tales are some of them almost incompre- 
hensible to readers unacquainted with the vocab- 
ulary of the competition-walla; and the reports 
of the British generals during the war with the 
Boers were besprinkled with words not hitherto 
supposed to be English. 

Some observers see in this a menace to the 
integrity of the language, a menace likely to be- 
come more threatening as the British Empire 
spreads itself still farther over the waste places 
of the earth. But is there not also a danger in 
the integrity of English close at home— in Eng- 
land Itself, even in London, and not afar in the 
remote borders of the Empire— the danger due 
87 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

to the prevalence of local dialects ? To the stu- 
dent of language one of the most obvious differ- 
ences between Great Britain and the United States 
lies in the fact that we in America have really no 
local dialects such as are common in England. 
Every county of England has an indigenous pop- 
ulation, whose ancestors dwelt in the same place 
since a time whereof the memory of man run- 
neth not to the contrary; and this indigenous 
population has its own peculiarities of pronuncia- 
tion, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down 
from father to son, generation after generation. 
But no one of the United States was settled 
exclusively by immigrants from a single English 
county; and, therefore, no one of these local 
dialects was ever transplanted bodily to America. 
And no considerable part of the United States 
has a stationary population, inbreeding and stag- 
nant and impervious to outside influences; 
indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and 
there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to 
grow up in the middle west, to be married in 
New York, and to die in Colorado— is not this a 
characteristic of us Americans ? And it is a 
characteristic fatal to the development of real 
dialects in this country such as are abundant in 
England. Of course we have our local peculi- 
arities of idiom and of pronunciation, but these 
are very superficial indeed. Probably there has 
88 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

been a closer uniformity of speech throughout 
the United States for fifty years past than there 
is even to-day in Great Britain, where the York- 
shireman cannot understand the cockney, and 
where the Scot sits silent in the house of the 
Cornishman. 

This uniformity of speech throughout the 
United States is, perhaps, partly the result of 
Noah Webster's ' Spelling-Book.' It has certainly 
been aided greatly by the public-school system, 
firmly established throughout the country, and 
steadily strengthening itself. The school system 
of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is 
not yet adequately organized; it has still to be 
adjusted to its place in a proper scheme of 
national education. In the higher institutions of 
learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge, 
there is no postgraduate work in English; and 
whatever instruction an undergraduate may get 
there in English literature is incidental, not to 
say accidental. 

Probably there is no connection between this 
lack of university instruction in English and a 
carelessness in the use of the language which 
strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpre- 
meditated letters of scholarly Englishmen, but 
sometimes even in their more academic efforts. 
Jowett's correspondence, for example, and Mat- 
thew Arnold's, offer examples of a slovenliness 
89 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

of phrase not to be found in Lowell's letters or 
in Emerson's. 

Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not 
merely among the uneducated, but among the 
more highly cultivated. Directly is used for as 
soon as by Archbishop Trench (the author of a 
lively little book on words) and by Mr. Court- 
hope (the Oxford professor of poetry). Like is 
used for ^5— that is, "like we do"— by Charles 
Darwin, and in more than one volume of the 
English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John 
Morley. The elision of the initial h, which the 
British themselves like to think a test of breeding, 
is discoverable far more often than they imagine 
on the lips of those who ought to know better. 
It is said that Lord Beaconsfield, for example, 
sometimes dropped his Z?'s, and that he once 
spoke of ''the 'urried 'Udson." And if we may 
rely on the evidence of spelling, the British often 
leave the h silent where we Americans sound it. 
They write an historical essay from which it is 
a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective 
'istorical. In Mr. Kipling's ' From Sea to Sea ' he 
writes not only an hotel and ajt hospital, but also 
an hydraulic. 

Thus we see that the immense size and varie- 
gated population of the British Empire may be 
considered as a menace to the integrity of the 
English language in the British Isles; and that a 
90 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

second source of danger is to be discovered in 
the local dialects of Great Britain; and, finally, 
that there is observable in England even now a 
carelessness in the use of the language and a 
willingness to innovate both in vocabulary and 
in idiom. 

But however formidable these three tendencies 
may look when massed together, there is really 
no weight to be attached to any of them singly 
or to all of them combined. The language has 
already for two centuries been exposed to con- 
tact with countless other tongues in America and 
Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration 
up to the present time; and there is no reason to 
fear that this contact will be more corrupting in 
the twentieth century than it has been in the 
nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather 
in an enrichment and refreshment of the vocabu- 
lary. The danger from the local dialects of Great 
Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by 
day as the facilities for travel improve and as the 
schoolmaster is able to impose his uniform Eng- 
lish upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to 
use new words not authorized by the past of the 
language is in itself not blameworthy; it may be 
indeed commendable when it is restrained by a 
conservative instinct and controlled by reason. 

The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of 
London newspapers are like the Americanisms to 
91 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

be seen in the pages of the New York news- 
papers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the 
healthiness of the language itself. In Latin it may 
be proper enough for us to set up a Ciceronian 
standard and to reject any usage not warranted 
by the masterly orator; but in English it is absurd 
to declare any merely personal standard and to 
reject any term or any idiom because it was un- 
known to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison 
or to Franklin, to Thackeray or to Hawthorne. 
Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision as re- 
gards the propriety of any usage may be accepted 
as final. English is a living tongue, and the 
great writers of every generation make unhesi- 
tating use of words and of constructions which 
the great writers of earlier generations were 
ignorant of or chose to ignore. 

The most of these British innovations, both of 
to-day and of to-morrow, will be individual and 
freakish ; and, therefore, they will win no foot- 
hold even in the British vocabulary. But a few 
of them will prove their own excuse for being, 
and these will establish themselves in Great 
Britain. The best of them, those of which the 
necessity is indisputable, will spread across the 
Atlantic and will be welcomed by the main body 
of users of English over here— just as certain 
American innovations and revivals were hospi- 
tably received in England when only the smaller 
92 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

branch of the English-speaking race was on the 
American side of the ocean. And, of course, 
the new terms which spring into existence in the 
United States after the literary center of the lan- 
guage has crossed the Atlantic will be carried 
over to England in books and in periodicals. 

When the bulk of contemporary English liter- 
ature is produced by American authors, and 
when the British themselves have accepted the 
situation and resigned themselves at last to the 
departure of the literary supremacy of London, 
then the weight of American precedent will be 
overwhelming. Without knowing it, British 
readers of American books will be led to conform 
to American usage; and American terms will not 
seem outlandish to them, as these words and 
phrases do even now, when comparatively few 
American authors are read in Great Britain. And 
these American innovations will be very few, for 
the conservative instinct is in some ways stronger 
in the United States than it is in Great Britain, 
due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread pop- 
ular education here, which gives to every child a 
certain solidarity with the past. 

It is education and the school-book; it is the 
printing-press and the newspaper and the maga- 
zine; it is the ease of travel across the Atlantic 
and the swiftness of the voyage;— it is a com- 
bination of all these things which will prevent 
93 



THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN 

any development of a British branch of the lan- 
guage after the numerical preponderance of the 
American people becomes overwhelming. And 
working toward the same union is a loyal con- 
servatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoy- 
ment of the great literature of the language, the 
common possession of both British and Ameri- 
cans, having its past in the keeping of the elder 
division of the stock, and certain to transfer its 
future to the care of the younger division. 

To declare that the literary center of English is 
to be transferred sooner or later from the British 
Isles to the United States may seem to some a 
hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as 
any prophecy before the event can hope to be. 
Such a transfer, it is true, is perhaps unprece- 
dented in literary history,— altho the scholar 
may see a close parallel in the preeminence once 
attained by Alexandria as the capital of Greek 
culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or 
not, the transfer is inevitable sooner or later. 

(1899) 



94 



V 

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

IT is a reflection upon what we are wont to term 
a liberal education that the result of college 
training sometimes appears to be rather a nar- 
rowing of the mental outlook than the broadening 
we have a right to anticipate. What a student 
ought to have got from his four years of labor is 
a conviction of the vastness of human know- 
ledge and a proper humility, due to his discov- 
ery that he himself possesses only an infinitesi- 
mal fraction of the total sum. Many graduates 
—indeed, most of them nowadays, we may 
hope— have attained to this much of wisdom: 
that they are not puffed up by the few things 
they do know, so much as made modest by the 
many things they cannot but admit themselves to 
be ignorant of. With the increasing specializa- 
tion of the higher education, the attitude of the 
graduate is likely to be increasingly humble; and 
a college man will not be led to feel that he is 
expected to know everything about everything. 
Perhaps the disputatious arrogance of a few of 
91 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

the younger graduates of an earlier generation 
was due to the dogmatism of the teaching they 
sat under. In nothing is our later instruction 
more improved than in the disappearance of this 
authoritative tone— due in great measure, it 
may be, to the unsettling of old theories by new 
facts. In no department of learning was the 
manner more dogmatic than in the teaching of 
the English language. The older rhetoricians 
had no doubts at all on the subject. They never 
hesitated as to the finality of their own judgment 
on all disputed points. They were sure that they 
knew just what the English language ought to 
be; and it never entered into their heads to ques- 
tion their own competence to declare the stan- 
dard of speech. Yet, as a matter of fact, they 
knew little of the long history of the language, 
and they had no insight into the principles that 
were governing its development. At most, their 
information was limited to the works of their 
immediate predecessors ; and for a more remote 
past they had the same supreme contempt they 
were ever displaying toward the actual present. 
Thus they were ever ready to lay down rules 
made up out of their own heads ; and their acts 
were as arbitrary as their attitude was intolerant. 
In his ' Philosophy of Rhetoric,' which he tells 
us was planned in 1750, Dr. George Campbell 
quotes with approval Dr. Johnson's assertion that 
98 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

the '' terms of the laboring and mercantile part of 
the people" are mere "fugitive cant," not to be 
" regarded as part of the durable matter of a 
language." Dr. Campbell himself refuses to 
consider it as an evidence of reputable and pres- 
ent use that a word or a phrase has been em- 
ployed by writers of political pamphlets or by 
speakers in the House of Commons, and he de- 
clares that he has selected his prose examples 
" neither from living authors, nor from those who 
wrote before the Revolution : not from the first, 
because an author's fame is not so firmly estab- 
lished in his lifetime; nor from the last, that 
there may be no suspicion that his style is su- 
perannuated." Now contrast this narrow-minded- 
ness with the liberality discoverable in our more 
recent text-books— in the ' Elements of Rhetoric,' 
for example, of Professor George R. Carpenter, 
who tells us frankly that *' whenever usage 
seems to differ, one's own taste and sense must 
be called into play." Professor Carpenter then 
pleads " for a considerable degree of tolerance in 
such matters. If we know what a man means, 
and if his usage is in accordance with that of a 
large number of intelligent and educated people, 
it cannot justly be called incorrect. For lan- 
guage rests, at bottom, on convention or agree- 
ment, and what a large body of reputable people 
recognize as a proper word or a proper meaning 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

of a word cannot be denied its right to a place in 
the English vocabulary." 

For an Englishman to object to an American- 
ism as such, regardless of its possible propri- 
ety or of its probable pertinence, and for an 
American to object to a Briticism as such— either 
of these things is equivalent to a refusal to allow 
the English language to grow. It is to insist 
that it is good enough now and that it shall not 
expand in response to future needs. It is to im- 
pose on our written speech a fatal rigidity. It is 
an attempt on the part of pedants so to bind the 
limbs of the language that a vigorous life will 
soon be impossible. With all such efforts those 
who have at heart the real welfare of our tongue 
will have no sympathy— least of all the strong 
men of literature who are forever ravenous after 
new words and old. Victor Hugo, for example, 
so far back as 1827, when the modern science of 
linguistics was still in its swaddling-clothes, had 
no difficulty in declaring the truth. " The French 
language," he wrote in the preface to ' Cromwell,' 
" is not fixed, and it never will be. A living lan- 
guage does not fix itself. Mind is always on the 
march, or, if you will, in movement, and lan- 
guages move with it. . . . In vain do our liter- 
ary Joshuas command the language to stand still; 
neither the language nor the sun stands still any 
more. The day they do they fix themselves; it 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

will be because they are dying. That is why 
the French of a certain contemporary school is a 
dead language." 

In the 'Art of French Poetry,' first printed in 
1565, Ronsard, one of the most adroit of Vic- 
tor Hugo's predecessors in the mastery of verse, 
proffers this significant advice to his fellow- 
craftsmen (I am availing myself of the satis- 
factory translation of Professor B. W. Wells): 
" You must choose and appropriate dexterously 
to your work the most significant words of the 
dialects of our France, especially if you have not 
such good or suitable words in your own dialect; 
and you must not mind whether the words are 
of Gascony, of Poitiers, of Normandy, Manche, 
or Lyonnais, as long as they are good and signify 
exactly what you want to say. . . . And ob- 
serve that the Greek language would never have 
been so rich in dialects or in words had it not 
been for the great number of republics that flour- 
ished at that time, . . . whence came many dia- 
lects, all held without distinction as good by the 
learned writers of those times. For a country 
can never be so perfect in all things that it can- 
not borrow sometimes from its neighbors." 

Here we have Ronsard declaring clearly that 
local varieties of speech are most useful to the 
common tongue. Indeed, we may regard the 
dialect of any district as a cache— a hidden store- 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

house— at which the language may replenish 
itself whenever its own supplies are exhausted. 
Whoever has had occasion to study any of these 
dialects, whether in Greek or in French or in 
English, must have been delighted often at the 
freshness and the force of words and phrases 
unexpectedly discovered. Edward Fitzgerald, 
the translator of Omar Khayyam, made an affec- 
tionate collection of Suffolk sea-phrases, and 
from these a dozen might be culled, or a score or 
more, by the use of which the English language 
would be the gainer. Lowell's loving and 
learned analysis of the speech of his fellow New- 
Englanders is familiar to all readers of the ' Big- 
low Papers.' It was Lowell also who has left us 
this brilliant definition : " True Americanisms are 
self-cocking phrases or words that are wholly of 
our own make, and do their work shortly and 
sharply at a pinch." 

Characteristically witty this definition is, no 
doubt, but not wholly adequate. What is an 
Americanism } And what is a Briticism } Not 
long ago a friendly British writer rebuked his 
fellow-countrymen for a double failing of theirs 
—for their twin tricks of assuming, first, that 
every vulgarism unfamiliar to them is an Ameri- 
canism, and that therefore, and secondly, every 
Americanism is a vulgarism. In the mouths of 
many British speakers " Americanism " serves as a 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

term of reproach ; and so does *' Briticism " in the 
mouths of some American speakers. But this 
should not be; the words ought to be used with 
scientific precision and with no flush of feeling. 
Before using them, we must ascertain with what 
exact meaning it is best to employ them. 

An American investigator gathered together a 
dozen or two queer words and phrases that he 
had noted in recent British books and journals, 
and as they were then wholly unknown to 
America, he branded them as Briticisms, only to 
evoke a prompt protest from Mr. Andrew Lang. 
For the stigmatized words and phrases Mr. Lang 
proffered no defense; but he boldly denied that 
it was fair to call them Briticisms. True, one or 
another of them had been detected in pages of 
this or that British author. Yet they were not 
common property: they were individualisms; 
they were to be charged against each separate 
perpetrator and not against the whole United 
Kingdom. Mr. Lang maintained that when 
Walter Pater used so odd a term as evanescing, 
this use '' scarcely makes it a Briticism ; it was a 
Paterism." 

This is a plea in confession and avoidance, 
but its force is indisputable. To admit it, how- 
ever, gives us a right to insist that the same jus- 
tice shall be meted out to the so-called American- 
isms which Mr. Lang has more than once held up 
103 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

to British execration. If the use of an ill-made 
word like essayette or leaderette or sermonette by 
one or more British writers does not make it a 
Briticism until it can be proved to have come 
into general use in Great Britain, then, of course, 
the verbal aberrations of careless Americans, or 
even the freakish dislocations of the vocabulary 
indulged in by some of our more acrobatic hu- 
morists, does not warrant a British writer in 
calling any chance phrase of theirs an Ameri- 
canism. Mr. W. S. Gilbert once manufactured 
the verb "to burgle," and Mr. Gilbert is a British 
writer of good repute ; but burgling is not there- 
fore a Briticism: it is a Gilbertism. Mr. Edison, 
an inventor of another sort, once affirmed that a 
certain article giving an account of his kineto- 
phonograph had his "entire indorsation." Ac- 
cording to Mr. Lang's theory, indorsation, not 
being in use generally in the United States, is 
not an Americanism: it is an Edisonism. 

The more Mr. Lang's theory is considered, the 
sounder it will appear. Individual word-coinages 
are not redeemable at the national treasury either 
in the United Kingdom or in the United States. 
Before a word or a phrase can properly be called 
a Briticism or an Americanism there must be 
proof that it has won its way into general use on 
its own side of the Atlantic. Right away for 
" at once " is an Americanism beyond all dispute, 
104 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

for it is wide-spread throughout the United 
States; and so is back of iox " behind." Directly 
for ''as soon as" is a Briticism equally indispu- 
table; and so is different to for " different from.'' 
In each of these four cases there has been a local 
divergence from the traditional usage of the Eng- 
lish language. All four of these divergences may 
be advantageous, and all four of them may even 
be accepted hereafter on both sides of the Atlan- 
tic; but just now there is no doubt that two of 
them are fairly to be called Americanisms and 
two of them are properly to be recorded as 
Briticisms. 

Every student of our speech knows that true 
Americanisms are abundant enough; but the 
omission of terms casually employed here and 
there, seed that fell by the wayside, springing up 
only to wilt away— the omission of all individu- 
alisms of this sort simplifies the list immensely, 
just as a like course of action in England cuts 
down the number of Briticisms fairly to be cata- 
logued as such. It must be remarked, however, 
that the collecting of so-called Americanisms is a 
pastime that has been carried on since the early 
years of the nineteenth century, whereas it was 
only in the closing decades of that century that 
attention was called to the existence of Briticisms, 
and to the necessity of a careful collection of 
them. The bulky tomes which pretend to be 
105 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

* Dictionaries of Americanisms ' are stuffed with 
words and phrases having no right there. 

These dictionaries would be very slim if they 
contained only true Americanisms, that is to say, 
words and phrases in common use in the United 
States and not in common use in the United 
Kingdom. Yet they woijld be slimmer still if 
another limitation is imposed on the use of the 
word. Is a term fairly to be called an American- 
ism if it can be shown to have been formerly in 
use in England, even though it may there have 
dropped out of sight in the past century or two ? 
Now, everybody knows that dozens of so-called 
Americanisms are good old English, neglected by 
the British and allowed to die out over there, but 
cherished and kept alive over here. Such is 
^^/^55=" incline to think"; such is realise— "to 
make certain or substantial"; such is reckon= 
''consider" or "deem"; such is a few=' 2i lit- 
tle"; such is nights =:'' at night"; and such are 
dozens of other words often foolishly animad- 
verted upon as indefensible Americanisms, and 
all of them solidly established in honorable an- 
cestry. An instructive collection of these survi- 
vals can be seen in Mr. H. C. Lodge's aptly en- 
titled and highly interesting essay on ' Shakspere's 
Americanisms.' 

It is with an am.used surprise that an American 
in his occasional reading keeps coming across in 
1 06 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

the pages of British authors of one century or an- 
other what he had supposed to be Americanisms, 
and even what he had taken sometimes for mere 
slang. The cert of the New York street-boy, 
apparently a contraction of certainly, is it not 
rather the certes of the Elizabethans ? And 
the interrogative Ijoiv ?=" what is it ? "—a usage 
abhorred by Dr. Holmes,— this can be discovered 
in Massinger's plays more than once (' Duke of 
Milan,' iii. 3, and 'Believe as You List,' ii. 2). 
" I 'm pretty considerably glad to see you," says 
Manuel, in Colley Gibber's ' She Would and She 
Would Not.' To fire out^^" expel forcibly," is 
in Shakspere's Sonnets and also in ' Ralph Rois- 
ter Doister '— altho, perhaps, with a slightly dif- 
ferent connotation from that now obtaining in 
America. A theatrical manager nowadays likes 
to have the first performance of a new play out 
of town so that he can come to the metropolis 
with a perfected work, and he calls this trying it 
on the dog ; the same expression, almost, is to be 
found in Pope. In ' Pickwick,' Sam Weller pro- 
poses to settle the hash of an opponent; and in 
* Tess of the Durbervilles ' we find dow7i to the 
ground used as a superlative, and quite in our 
own later sense. The Southern peart is in * Lor- 
na Doone,' and the Southwestern dog-gone it is in 
the 'Little Minister.' In Mr. Barrie's story also 
do we find to go back on your word ; just as in 
107 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

Mr. William Watson's ' Excursions in Criticism ' 
we discover ^n? ='' staying power" or *'dog- 
gedness." 

Very amusing indeed is the attitude of the 
ordinary British newspaper reviewer toward 
words and phrases in this category. Not being 
a scholar in English, he is unaware that scholar- 
ship is a condition precedent to judgment; and 
he is swift to denounce as American innovations 
terms firmly rooted in the earlier masters of the 
language, while he passes the frequent Briticisms 
in the pages of contemporary London writers 
without a hint of reproof. From a British author 
like Rossetti he accepts "the gracile spring," 
while he rejects ''gracile ease" in an American 
author like Mr. Howells. Behind this arrogant 
ignorance is to be perceived the assumption that 
the English language is in immediate peril of dis- 
ease and death from American license if British 
newspapers fail to do their duty. The shriller 
the shriek of protest is, the slighter the protester's 
competence upon the question at issue. No out- 
cry against the deterioration of English in Amer- 
ica has come from any of the British scholars who 
can speak with authority about the language. 

What we Americans have done is to keep alive 
or to revive many a good old English term; and 
for this service to our common speech our British 
cousins ought to be properly grateful. We must 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

admit that words and phrases and usages thus 
reinstated are not true Americanisms— however 
much we might like to claim them for our very 
own. We have already seen that most of the 
individualisms of eccentric or careless writers are 
also not to be received as true Americanisms. 
And there is yet a third group of so-called Ameri- 
canisms not fairly entitled to the name. These 
are the terms devised in the United States to 
meet conditions unknown in England. Here is 
no divergence from the accepted usage of the 
language, but a development of the common 
tongue to satisfy a new necessity. The need for 
the new word or phrase was first felt in America, 
and here the new term had to be found to sup- 
ply the immediate want. But the word itself, 
altho frankly of American origin, is not to be 
styled an Americanism. It is a new English 
word, that is all— a word to be used hereafter in 
the United Kingdom as in the United States. It 
is an American contribution to the English lan- 
guage; but it is not an Americanism— if we limit 
Americanism to mean a term having currency 
only in North America, just as Briticism means a 
term having currency only in the British Islands. 
The new thing exists now, and as it came into 
existence in America, we stood sponsors for it; 
but the name we gave it is its name once for all, 
to be used by the British and the Australians 
109 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

and the Canadians as well as by ourselves. 
Telephone, for example,— both the thing and the 
word are of American invention,— is there any 
one so foolish as to call telephone an Americanism? 
These American contributions to the English 
language are not a few. Some of them are brand- 
new words, minted at the minute of sudden de- 
mand, and well made or ill miade, as chance would 
have it; phonograph is one of these; dime is 
another; and typewriter is a third. Some of 
them are old words wrenched to a new use, 
like elevator = "storehouse for grain," and like 
//^^^r =" telegraphic printing-machine." Some 
of them are taken from foreign tongues, either 
translated, like statehouse (from the Dutch), or 
unchanged, like prairie (from the French), adobe 
(from the Spanish), 2ind stoop (from the Dutch). 
Some of them are borrowed from the rude 
tongues of our predecessors on this continent, 
like moccasin and tomahawk and wigwam. To 
be compared with this last group are the words 
adopted into English from the native languages 
of \x\d\2i— punka, for example. And I make no 
doubt that the Australians have taken over from 
the aborigines round about them more than one 
word needed in a hurry as a name for something 
until then nameless in our common language 
because the something itself was until then un- 
known or unnoticed. But these Australian con- 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

tributions to English cannot be called Australian- 
isms any more than telephone and prairie and 
wigwam can be called Americanisms. 

So far the attempt has been here made to sub- 
tract from the immense and heterogeneous mass 
of so-called Americanisms three classes of terms 
falsely so called: first, the mere individualisms, 
for which America as a whole has a right to shirk 
the responsibility; second, the survivals in the 
United States of words and usages that happen 
to have fallen into abeyance in Great Britain; and, 
third, the American contributions to the English 
language. As to each of these three groups the 
case is clear enough; but as to a fourth group, 
which ought also to be deducted, one cannot 
speak with quite so much confidence. 

This group would include the peculiarities of 
speech existing sporadically in this or that special 
locality and contributing what are often called 
the American dialects— the Yankee dialect first 
of all, then the dialect of the Appalachian moun- 
taineers, the dialect of the V\/estern cow-boys, etc. 
Are these localisms fairly to be classed as Ameri- 
canisms ? The question, so far as I know, has 
never been raised before, for it has been taken 
for granted that if any such things as American- 
isms existed at all, they could surely be collected 
from the mouth of Hosea Biglow. And yet if 
we pause to think, we cannot but admit that the 
III 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

so-called Yankee dialect is local, that it is un- 
known outside of New England, and that a ma- 
jority of the inhabitants of the United States find 
it almost as strange in their ears as the broad 
Scotch of Burns. As for the so-called dialect of 
the cow-boy, it is not a true dialect at all; it is 
simply carelessly colloquial English with a heavy 
infusion of fugitive slang; and whatever it may 
be in itself, it is local to the cow-country. The 
Appalachian dialect is perhaps more like a true 
dialect; but it is even less wide-spread than either 
of the others here picked out for consideration. 
No one of these three alleged dialects is in 
any sense national; all three of them are nar- 
rowly local— altho the New England speech has 
spread more or less into the middle west. 

Perhaps some light on this puzzle may be had 
by considering how they regard a similar problem 
in England itself. The local dialects which still 
abound throughout the British Isles are under 
investigation, each by itself. No one has ever 
suggested the lumping of them all together as 
Briticisms. Indeed, the very definition of Briticism 
would debar this. What is a Briticism but a term 
frequently used throughout Great Britain and not 
accepted in the United States ? And if this de- 
finition is acceptable, we are forced to declare 
that an Americanism is a term frequently used 
throughout the United States and not accepted in 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

Great Britain. Thie terms of the Yankee dialect, 
of the Appalachian, and of the cow-boy, are lo- 
calisms; they are not frequently used throughout 
the United States; they are not to be classed as 
Americanisms any more than the cockney idioms, 
the Wessex words, and the Yorkshire phrases 
are to be classed as Briticisms. 

It is greatly to be regretted that Dr. Murray 
and Mr. Bradley and the other editors of the com- 
prehensive Oxford Dictionary have not been so 
careful as they might be in identifying the local- 
ity of American dialectic peculiarities. They 
have taken great pains to recorcj and circumscribe 
British dialectic peculiarities; but they are in the 
habit of appending a vague and misleading (U. S.) 
to such American words and usages as they may 
set down. It is to be hoped that they may here- 
after aim at a greater exactness in their attribu- 
tions, since their present practice is quite mis- 
leading, as it often suggests that a term is a true 
Americanism, used freely throughout the United 
States, when it is perhaps merely an individualism 
or at best a localism. 

Of true Americanisms there are not so very 
many left, when we have ousted from their 
usurped places these four groups of terms having 
no real title to the honorable name. And true 
Americanisms might be subdivided again into 
two groups, the one containing the American 

113 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

terms for which there are equivalent Briticisms, 
thus indicating a divergence of usage, and the 
other including only the words and phrases which 
have sprung up here without correlative activity 
on the other side of the Atlantic. 

When the attempt is made to set up parallel 
columns of Briticisms and Americanisms, each 
more or less equal to the other, it is with sur- 
prise that we discover how few of these equiva- 
lencies there are. In other words, the variations 
of usage between Great Britain and the United 
States are infrequent. In England the railway 
was preceded by the stage-coach, and in America 
the railroad was preceded rather by the river 
steamboat; and probably this accounts for the 
slight differentiation observable in the vocabulary 
of the traveler. But this is not the reason why 
we in America make misuse of a French word, 
depot, while the British prefer the Latin word 
terminus, —restricting its application accurately to 
the terminal station of a line. In England they 
name him a guard whom we in America name 
brakeman or trainman; and it is to be noted that 
when Stevenson was an Amateur Emigrant he 
sought to use the word of the country and so 
mentions the brakesman— thus proving again the 
difficulty of attaining exactness in local usage. 
The British call that a goods-train which we call 
2i freight-train; and they speak of a crossing-plate 
114 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

when they mean what we know as a frog. In 
the United States a sleeping-car is often termed 
a sleeper, whereas in Great Britain what they call 
a sleeper is what we here call a tie. They say a key- 
less watch where we say a stem-winder. They 
say leader where we say editorial. They call that 
a lift which we call an elevator; and we call him 
a farm-hand whom they call an agricultural 
laborer. They have even borrowed one Ameri- 
canism, caucus, and made it a Briticism by 
changing its meaning to signify what we are 
wont to describe as the machine or the organi- 
sation. It is to be noted also that corn in Eng- 
land refers to wheat and in America to maiie; 
and that in Great Britain calico is a plain cotton 
cloth and in the United States a printed cotton 
cloth. 

This list of correlative Americanisms and Bri- 
ticisms might be extended, of course; but how- 
ever sweeping our investigations may be we 
cannot make it very long. Far longer is the list 
of American words and phrases and usages for 
which there is no British equivalent— far too long, 
indeed, for inclusion in this essay. All that can 
be done here and now is to pick up a surface 
specimen or two from the outcroppings to show 
the quality of the vein. For instance, the vocabu- 
lary of the university is largely indigenous— altho 
we have recently borrowed a British vulgarism, 
115 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

speaking now of the varsity team and the varsity 
crew. Campus seems to be unknown to the 
British, and so does sophomoric, a most useful 
epithet understood at once all over the United 
States. Its absence from the British vocabulary 
is probably due to the fact that the four-year 
course of the old-fashioned American college is 
unknown in England, where there ^re freshmen 
indeed, but no sophomores. 

Going out from the academic groves to the 
open air of the wider West, as so many of our 
college graduates do every year, we meet with a 
host of Americanisms vigorous with the free life 
of the great river and of the grand mountains. 
But is blaie=" to mark a trail through the 
woods by chipping off bits of bark "—is this a 
true Americanism ? Is it not rather an American 
contribution to the English language ? Surely 
every man in Africa or in Asia who wishes to 
retrace his path through a virgin forest must 
needs bla:ie his way as he goes. But shack 
= '' a. cabin of logs driven perpendicularly into the 
ground "—this is a true Americanism undoubt- 
edly. And its compound claim-shack =''3. shack 
built to hold a claim on a preemption "—this 
is another true Americanism likely to puzzle 
a British reader. Even preempt and preemp- 
tion are probably Americanisms in that they 
have with us a meaning somewhat different from 
116 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

that they may have on the other side of the At- 
lantic. Another true Americanism, which comes 
to us from the plains, is mavericks=" the un- 
branded cattle at large to become the property 
of the first ranch-owner whose men may chance 
upon them." And ranch, while it is itself a con- 
tribution to the language, has usages in which it 
is an Americanism merely— as in the Californian 
hen-ranch, for example. 

There is a large freedom about the Western 
vernacular and a swift directness not elsewhere 
observable in the English language, whether in 
the United States or in the British Empire. These 
are most valuable qualities, and they are likely to 
be of real service to English in helping to refresh 
the jaded vocabulary of more scholarly commu- 
nities. The function of slang as a true feeder of 
language is certain to get itself more widely re- 
cognized as time goes on; and there is no better 
nursery for these seedlings of speech than the 
territory west of the Mississippi and east of the 
Rockies. To say this is not to say that there are 
not to be found east of the Mississippi many in- 
teresting locutions still inadequately established 
in the language. For example, there are three 
words applied to the same thing in different parts 
of the East; perhaps they ought to be styled lo- 
calisms, but as they would be comprehended all 
over the United States, they are probably entitled 
117 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

to be received as true Americanisms— if, on the 
other hand, they are not in fact good old English 
words. A pass through the hills is often called 
a notch in the White Mountains, a clove in the 
Catskills, and a gap in the Blue Ridge. Yet 
even as I write this I have my doubts as to 
there being any narrow geographical delimitation 
of usage, since I can recall a Parker Notch in the 
Catskills, not far from Stony Clove and Kaaters- 
kill Clove. 

One of the best known of true Americanisms 
is lumber— ''Wmhtr." When we speak of 
the lumbering industry we mean not only the 
cutting down of trees and their sawing up into 
planks, but also their marketing. From the ap- 
parent participle lumbering a verb has been 
made to lumber— 2i not uncommon process in 
the history of the language, one British analog 
being the making of the verb to bant from the 
innocent name of Mr. Banting. To lumber is 
apparently now used in the sense of to deforest, 
if we may rely on a newspaper paragraph which 
informed us that a certain tract of twenty-five 
thousand acres in the Adirondacks had " been 
lumbered, but not in such a way as to injure it 
for a park." The verb to latmder=" to wash," 
has been revived of late in America, if indeed it 
has not been made anew from the noun laundry ; 
and shirt-makers in their price-lists specify whe- 
ii8 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

ther the shirts are to be sold laundered or un- 
laundered. And to the word laundry itself has 
been given a further extension of meaning. In 
New York, at least,— and the verbal fashions of 
the metropolis spread swiftly throughout the 
Union,— it signifies not only the place where 
personal linen is washed but the personal linen 
itself. An advertisement in a college magazine 
informed the lone student that " gentlemen's 
laundry" was "mended free." 

When an American student of English printed 
a collection of Briticisms in which more than one 
strange wild fowl of speech had been snared on 
the wing in newspapers and advertisements, Mr. 
Andrew Lang protested against the acceptance of 
phrases so gathered as representative Briticisms; 
and it is only fair to admit that they represented 
colloquial or industrial rather than literary usage. 
Yet they were interesting in that they gave us a 
glimpse of the actual speech of the common peo- 
ple—just such a glimpse, in fact, as we get from 
the Roman inscriptions. This actual speech of 
the people, whether in Rome or in London or in 
New York, is the real language, of which the 
literary dialect is but a sublimation. Language 
is born in the mouth, altho it dies young un- 
less it is brought up by hand. Language is made 
sometimes in the library, it is true, and in the 
parlor also, but far more often in the workshop 
119 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

and on the sidewalk; and nowadays the news- 
paper and the advertisement record for us the 
simple and unstilted phrases of the workshop 
and the sidewalk. 

The most of these will fade out of sight unre- 
gretted; but a few will prove themselves pos- 
sessed of sturdy vitality. Briticisms, it may be, 
or Americanisms, as it happens, they will fight 
their way up from the workshop to the library, 
from the sidewalk to the study. Born in a single 
city, they will serve usefully throughout a great 
nation, and perhaps in the end all over the world, 
wherever our language is spoken. 

The ideal of style, so it has been tersely put, 
is the speech of the people in the mouth of the 
scholar. One reason why so much of the aca- 
demic writing of educated men is arid is because 
it is as remote as may be from the speech of the 
people. One reason why Mark Twain and Rud- 
yard Kipling are now the best-beloved authors of 
the English language is because they have each 
of them a welcome ear for the speech of the 
people. Mark Twain abounds in true American- 
isms ; on the other hand, Rudyard Kipling is spar- 
ing of real Briticisms— having, indeed, a certain 
hankering after Americanisms. Kipling's case is 
not unlike that of y^schylus, who was a native 
of Greece but a frequent resident in Sicily, and in 
whose vocabulary occasional Sicilianisms have 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

been found by the keen-eyed German critics. 
So Plautus greedily availed himself of the vigor- 
ous fertility he discovered in the vocabulary of 
the Roman populace; and when Cicero went to 
the works of Plautus for the words he needed, 
we had once more the speech of the people in 
the mouth of the scholar. 

Something of the toploftiness of the elder rheto- 
ricians yet lingers in the tone many British writers 
of to-day see fit to adopt whenever they take oc- 
casion to discuss the use of the English language 
here in America. A trenchant critic like Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, in a lecture on the masters of 
style, went out of his way to warn his hearers 
that though they might be familiar in their writ- 
ing they were by no means to be vulgar. " At 
any rate, be easy, colloquial if you like, but shun 
those vocables which come to us across the At- 
lantic, or from Newmarket and Whitechapel." 
This linking of America and Whitechapel may 
seem to us to be rather vulgar than familiar; and 
it was Goethe— a master of style well known to 
Mr. Harrison— who reminded us that "when 
self-esteem expresses itself in contempt of an- 
other, be he the meanest, it must be repellant." 
It is only fair to say that fewer British writers 
than ever before sink to so low a level as this; 
and it is right to admit that a definite recognition 
of the American joint-ownership of the Eng- 

121 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

lish language is not now so rare as once it was 
in England. 

Not often, however, do we find so frank and 
ungrudging acknowledgment of the exact truth 
as is to be found in Mr. William Archer's 'Amer- 
ica To-day.' Part of one of the Scotch critic's 
paragraphs calls for quotation here because it 
sets forth, perhaps more clearly and concisely 
than any American has yet dared to do, what the 
facts of the case really are : 

" There can be no rational doubt, I think, that 
the English language has gained, and is gaining, 
enormously by its expansion over the American 
continent. The prime function of a language, 
after all, is to interpret the ' form and pressure ' 
of life— the experience, knowledge, thought, 
emotion, and aspiration of the race which em- 
ploys it. This being so, the more tap-roots a 
language sends down into the soil of life, and 
the more varied the strata of human experience 
from which it draws its nourishment, whether of 
vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be its 
potentialities as a medium of expression. We 
must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism 
healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; 
but to that duty American writers are quite as 
keenly alive as we. It is not a source of weak- 
ness but of power and vitality to the English lan- 
guage that it should embrace a greater variety of 

122 



AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE 

dialects than any other civilized tongue. A new 
language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but 
a multiplicity of dialects means, for the posses- 
sors of the main language, an enlargement of the 
pleasures of the linguistic sense without the fa- 
tigue of learning a totally new grammar and 
vocabulary. So long as there is a potent literary 
tradition keeping the core of the language one 
and indivisible, vernacular variations can only 
tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to 
promote the abundance, suppleness, and nicety 
of adaptation of the language as a literary instru- 
ment. The English language is no mere historic 
monument, like Westminster Abbey, to be reli- 
giously preserved as a relic of the past, and rever- 
enced as the burial-place of a bygone breed of 
giants. It is a living organism, ceaselessly busied, 
like any other organism, in the processes of assim- 
ilation and excretion." 
(1899) 



123 



VI 

NEW WORDS AND OLD 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

NOT long before the opening of the splendid 
exhibition which, for the short space of six 
months, made Chicago the most interesting city 
in the world, its leading literary journal editorially 
rejoiced that English was becoming a world-lan- 
guage, but sorrowed also that it was sadly in 
danger of corruption, especially from the piebald 
jargon of our so-called dialect stories. Not long 
before the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of 
Queen Victoria a notorious sensation-monger of 
London, having founded a review in which to 
exploit himself, proclaimed that English was in 
a parlous state, and that something ought to be 
done at once or the language would surely die. 
The Chicago editor was grieved at the sorry con- 
dition of our language in the United States, while 
the London editor wept over its wretched plight 
in Great Britain. The American journalist called 
upon us to take pattern by the British; and the 
British journalist cried out for an Academy like 
that of the French to lay down laws for the 
127 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Speaking of our mother-tongue— intending per- 
haps to propose later the revival of the pillory or 
of the ducking-stool for those who shall infringe 
the stringent provisions of the new code. 

There is nothing novel in these shrill outbreaks, 
which serve only to alarm the timid and to reveal 
an unhesitating ignorance of the history of our 
language. The same kind of protest has been 
made constantly ever since English has been re- 
cognized as a tongue worthy of preservation and 
protection; and it would be easy to supply paral- 
lels without number, some of them five hundred 
years old. A single example will probably suffice. 
In Steele's * Tatler ' Swift wrote a letter denoun- 
cing " the deplorable ignorance that for some 
years hath reigned among our English writers, 
the great depravity of our taste, and the continual 
corruption of our style." Here we find the ' Tat- 
ler ' (of London) in the first decade of the eigh- 
teenth century saying exactly what the ' Dial ' (of 
Chicago) echoed in the last decade of the nine- 
teenth. But the earlier writer had an excuse the 
later writer was without; Swift wrote before the 
history of our language was understood. 

We know now that growth is a condition of 
life; and that only a dead language is rigid. We 
know now that it is dangerous to elevate the 
literary diction too far above the speech of the 
plain people. We have found out that nobody 
128 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin; Cicero did 
not speak it himself; he did not even write it 
naturally; he wrote it with an effort and not 
always to his own satisfaction at the first attempt. 
We have discovered that there was a wide gap 
between the elegance of the orator's polished 
periods and the uncouth bluntness of the vulgar 
tongue of the Roman people ; and we believe that 
this divergence was broader than that between 
the perfect style of Hawthorne, for example, 
and the every-day dialect of Salem or of Con- 
cord. 

By experts like Whitney we are told that there 
has been less structural modification of our lan- 
guage in the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury than in any other fifty-year period of its 
existence. Our vocabulary has been enormously 
enriched, but the skeleton of our speech has been 
only a little developed. With the decrease in 
illiteracy the conserving force of the printing- 
press must always hereafter make change in- 
creasingly difficult— even in the obvious cases 
where improvement is possible. The indirect 
influence of the novelist and the direct influence 
of the schoolmaster— very powerful each of them 
and almost irresistible when united— will always 
be exerted on the side of the conservatives. To 
seize these facts firmly and to understand their 
applications is to have ready always an ample 
129 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

answer for all those who chatter about the im- 
pending corruption of our noble tongue. 

But we may go further. The study of history 
shows us that the future of English is dependent 
not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not 
upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its 
vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syn- 
tax, not upon the needed reform of its orthog- 
raphy; it is not dependent upon any purity or 
any corruption of the language itself. The future 
of the English language is dependent upon the 
future of the two great peoples that speak it; it 
is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the 
vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Ameri- 
cans. A language is but the instrument of those 
who use it; and English has flourished and spread 
not because of its own merits, many as they are, 
but because of the forthputting qualities of the 
masterful English stock. It must rise and fall 
with us who speak it. " No speech can do more 
than express the ideas of those who employ it at 
the time," so a recent historian of our language 
has reminded us. " It cannot live upon its past 
meanings, or upon the past conceptions of great 
men that have been recorded in it, any more than 
the race which uses it can live upon its past glory 
or its past achievements." 

When we have once possessed ourselves of 
the inexorable fact that it is not in our power 
130 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

to warp the development of our language by any 
conscious effort, we can listen with amused tol- 
eration to the excited outcries of those who are 
constantly protesting against this or that word or 
phrase or usage which may seem to them new 
and therefore unjustifiable. We discover also 
that the self-appointed legislators who lay down 
the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in 
exact proportion to their ignorance of the history 
of the language. 

''Every word we speak," so Dr. Holmes told 
us, " is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, 
struck in the die of some human experience, 
worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and al- 
ways transferred warm from one to another." 
We must admit that these chance medalists of 
language have not always been gifted artists or 
skilled craftsmen, so the words of their striking 
are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always 
respected the standard, so there is counterfeit 
coin in circulation sometimes. Even when the 
w^ord is sterling and well minted, be it new or 
old, 

Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess, 
And now of a Bloody Mary, 

the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the 

reserve, to be misrepresented by a shabby paper 

promise to pay. So fierce is the popular demand 

131 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

for an increased per capita that the verbal cur- 
rency is ever in danger of debasement. This is 
the apparent justification of the self-appointed 
tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of 
their own and who venture to throw out much 
false coin. Their tests are trustv/orthy now and 
again; but more often than not the pieces they 
have nailed to the counter are of full weight and 
ought to pass current. 

"There is a purism," Whitney said, "which, 
while it seeks to maintain the integrity of the 
language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too 
fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, 
familiar and colloquial expressions, is little less 
fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue than 
to rush into the opposite extreme." And Pro- 
fessor Lounsbury goes further and asserts that 
our language is not to-day in danger from the 
agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it, 
but rather " from ignorant efforts made to pre- 
serve what is called its purity." And elsewhere 
the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that 
"the history of language is the history of cor- 
ruptions," and that "the purest of speakers uses 
every day, with perfect propriety, words and 
forms which, looked at from the point of view 
of the past, are improper, if not scandalous." 

There would be both interest and instruction in 
a list of the many words securely intrenched in 
132 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

our own vocabulary to-day which were bitterly 
assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises 
himself for his valiant effort against certain of 
these intruders: "I have done my utmost for 
some years past to stop the progress of mob and 
banter, but have been plainly borne down by 
numbers and betrayed by those who promised to 
assist me." Puttenham (or whoever it was that 
wrote the anonymous 'Arte of English Poesie,' 
published in 1589) admitted the need of certain 
words to which the purists might justly object, 
and then adds that " many other like words bor- 
rowed out of the Latin and French were not so 
well to be allowed by us," citing then, among 
those of which he disapproved, audacious, 
egregious, and compatible. In the 'Poetaster,' 
acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston's 
verbal innovations, and among the words he 
reviled are clumsy, inflate, spurious, conscious, 
strenuous, defunct, retrograde, and reciprocal; 
and in his 'Discoveries' Jonson shrewdly re- 
marked that " a man coins not a new word with- 
out some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to 
be received, the praise is but moderate; if re- 
fused, the scorn is assured." 

Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth 
century, Jonson at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth. Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth; 
and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find 
133 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Lady Holland declaring influential to be a detest- 
able word and asserting that she had tried in vain 
to get Sheridan to forego it. 

At the end of the nineteenth century the battle 
was still raging over standpoint, for example, and 
over reliable and over lengthy, and over a score 
of others, all of which bid fair to establish them- 
selves ultimately because they supply a demand 
more or less insistent. The fate is more doubt- 
ful of photo for photograph and of phone for tele- 
phone ; they both strike us now as vulgarisms, 
just as mob (and for the same reason) struck 
Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in time they 
will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as 
mob has survived it. Then there is the misbe- 
gotten verb, to enthuse, in my sight the most 
hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate t 
Altho I have detected it in the careful col- 
umns of the 'Nation,' it has not as yet been 
adopted by any acknowledged master of Eng- 
lish; none the less, I fear me greatly, it has all 
the vitality of other ill weeds. And is bike going 
to get itself recognized as a substitute for bicycle, 
both as verb and as noun ? It seems to be pos- 
sible, since a monosyllable has always an advan- 
tage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths. 

Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of 
words " when we are already overloaded with 
monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our lan- 
134 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

guage." Then he wittily characterizes the pro- 
cess by which 7nob had been made, cab was to 
be made, and photo is now in the making : ** Thus 
we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the 
owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their 
legs to prevent them from running away; and if 
ours be the same reason for maiming our words, 
it will certainly answer the end: for I am sure 
no other nation will desire to borrow them." 
Swift was rash enough to assert that speculation, 
operation, preliminaries, ambassador, communica- 
tion, and battalion were words newly introduced, 
and also to prophesy that they were too poly- 
syllabic to be able to endure many more cam- 
paigns. As it happens no attempt has been made 
to shorten any one of them except speculation, 
and it can hardly be maintained that spec has 
established itself. Certainly it has not disestab- 
lished speculation, as mob has driven out mobile 
vulgus. 

Dryden declared that he traded *' both with the 
living and the dead for the enrichment of our 
native language"; but he denied that he Latin- 
ized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he 
attempted have not won acceptance. Lowell 
thought that Dryden did not add a single word 
to the language, unless " he first used magnetism 
in its present sense of moral attraction." Dr. 
Holmes also discovered that it is not enough to 
^35 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

make a new word when it is needed and to fash- 
ion it fitly; its fortune still depends on public 
caprice or popular instinct. " I 've sometimes 
made new words," he told a friend; " I made 
chrysocracy, thinking it would take its place, but 
it did n't; plutocracy, meaning the same thing, 
was adopted instead." But anesthesia is a word 
of Dr. Holmes's making which has won its way 
not only in English but in most of the other 
modern languages. It may be doubted whether 
a like fortune will follow another word to be 
found quoted in one of his letters, aproposity, a 
bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our 
language. 

It is with surprise that in Stevenson's very 
Scotch romance ' David Balfour ' we happen upon 
another xn?i\ioxvn3X\on— come-at-able, hitherto sup- 
posed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma. 
Elsewhere in the same story we read " you claim 
to be innocent," a form which the cockney critics 
are wont to call American. Stevenson in this 
novel uses both the modern jeopardise and the 
ancient enjeopardy. Just why to jeopardise 
should have driven to jeopard out of use, it is not 
easy to declare, nor why leniency is supplanting 
lenity. As drunk seems to suggest total intoxi- 
cation, it is possible to discover the cause of the 
increasing tendency to say " I have drank,'' No 
defense is easy of in our midst for in the midst 
136 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

of US, and yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is 
a convenient short-cut. Dr. Holmes confessed 
to Richard Grant White that he had used it once, 
and that Edward Everett (who had also once 
fallen from grace) made him see the error of his 
ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson's 
'Amateur Emigrant,' and again in the ' Res Judi- 
catse' of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a brisk essayist, 
altho not an impeccable stylist. 

It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To 
call it a neologism is but begging the question. 
Of necessity every word was new once. It was 
'' struck in the die of human experience," to come 
back to Dr. Holmes's figure; and it is at its best 
before it is " worn smooth by innumerable con- 
tacts." Lowell thought it was a chief element 
of Shakspere's greatness that " he found words 
ready to his use, original and untarnished— types 
of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by 
repeated impressions." He ''found a language 
already established but not yet fetlocked by dic- 
tionary and grammar mongers." For the same 
reason Merimee delighted in Russian, because it 
was "young, the pedants not having had time 
to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry." 

This native relish for the uncontaminated word 

it was that led Hugo and Gautier to ransack all 

sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for the 

unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rud- 

137 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

yard Kipling to avail himself of the technical 
terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not 
merely because they are exact, but also because 
they are unexpected. The device is dangerous, 
no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions can 
find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot 
was a little too fond of injecting into fiction the 
terminology of science, but there was nothing 
blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabu- 
lary which should be at the command of the 
novelist. Professor Dowden records that when 
she used in a story words and phrases like dy- 
namic and natural selection, the reviewer pricked 
up his delicate ears and shied; and he makes bold 
to suggest that " if the thoroughbred critic could 
only be led close up to dynamic, he would find 
that dynamic would not bite." Every lover of 
our language will sympathize with Professor 
Dowden's assertion that " a protest of common 
sense is really called for against the affectation 
which professes to find obscurity in words be- 
cause they are trisyllabic or because they carry 
with them scientific associations. Language, the 
instrument of literary art, is an instrument of 
ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in 
an age when the air is saturated with scientific 
thought, would be to reject those accessions to 
the language which are the special gain of the 
time." 

138 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Where George Eliot erred— if err she did at all 
in this matter— was in the use of scientific terms 
inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully, whereby 
she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the 
purpose in hand. Every writer needs to consider 
most carefully both the obvious and the remote 
associations of the phrases he employs, that these 
may intensify the thought he wishes to convey. 
A word is known by the company it has kept. 
Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the 
fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor. 
The magic of his art lies largely in the syllables 
he selects, in their sound and in their color. Not 
their meanings merely are important to him, but 
their suggestions also — not what they denote 
more than what they connote. An American 
psychologist has recently told us that every word 
has not only its own note but also its overtones. 
With unconscious foresight, the great poets have 
always acted on this theory. 

Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have 
ever been ready to rescue a cast-off word from 
the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle 
(of Oxford) declares that " it has been one of the 
most interesting features of the new vigor and 
independence of American literature, that it has 
often displayed in a surprising manner what 
springs of novelty there are in reserve and to be 
elicited by novel combinations"— a statement 
139 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

more complimentary in its intent than felicitous 
in its phrasing. And Professor Earle praises 
Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill 
in enriching our modern English with the old 
words locked up out of sight in the treasuries of 
the past. Lowell said of Emerson that " his eye 
for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is 
like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he 
will dredge you up a choice word from the mud 
of Cotton Mather himself." 

Of course this effort to recover the scattered 
pearls of speech, dropped by the wayside in the 
course of the centuries, is peculiar neither to the 
United States nor to the nineteenth century— 
altho perhaps it has been carried further in our 
country and in our time than anywhere else. 
Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old 
Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused 
by an acrid critic of having made a list of obsolete 
words, which he strove deliberately to reintroduce 
into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought 
to do with Chaucer's vocabulary; and it is curious 
to reflect that, owing, it may be, in part, to the 
example set by the author of the 'Faerie Queene,' 
the language of the * Canterbury Tales ' is far 
less strange, less remote, less archaic to us to-day 
than it was to the Elizabethans. 

A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going 
on constantly. Words are swiftly worn out and 
140 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

used up and thrown aside. New words are 
made or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old 
words are impressed into service and forced to 
do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary 
completed than the editor sets about his inevi- 
table supplement. And the dictionary is not only 
of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate in 
its definitions, for it may happen that a word will 
take on an added meaning while the big book 
is at the bindery. Our language is fluctuating 
always ; and now one word and now another has 
expanded its content or has shrunk away into 
insignificance. No definition is surely stable for 
long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of 
his own style disgust was fairly equivalent to 
dislike ; " and if a more massy way of writing be 
never so much disgusted at this day, a better 
gust will come on." 

Once upon a time to aggravate meant to in- 
crease an offense; now it is often used as tho 
it meant to irritate. Formerly calculated— 2iS in 
the sentence " it was calculated to do harm "— . 
implied a deliberate intention to injure; now the 
idea of intention has been eliminated and the 
sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to " it 
was likely to do harm." Verbal is slowly get- 
ting itself accepted as synonymous with oral, in 
antithesis to written. Lurid was really pale, wan, 
ghastly ; but how often of late has it been em- 
141 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

ployed as tho it signified red or ruddy or 
bloody ? 

At first these new uses of these old words 
were slovenly and inadmissible inaccuracies, but 
by sheer insistence they are winning their par- 
don, until at last they will gain authority as they 
broaden down from precedent to precedent. It 
is well to be off with the old word before you 
are on with the new; and no writer who re- 
spects his mother-tongue is ever in haste to take 
up with words thus wrested from the primitive 
propriety. 

But, as Dryden declared when justifying his 
modernizing of Chaucer's vocabulary, "Words 
are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be 
removed; customs are changed, and even statutes 
are silently repealed when the reason ceases for 
which they were enacted." It was Dryden's 
"Cousin Swift" who once declared that "a nice 
man is a man of nasty ideas"— an assertion 
which I venture to believe to be wholly incom- 
prehensible to-day to the young ladies of Eng- 
land in whose mouths nice means agreeable and 
nasty means disagreeable. Nice has suffered this 
inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States 
as well as in Great Britain, but nasty has not yet 
been emptied of its original offensiveness here as 
It has over there. And even in British speech the 
transformation is relatively recent; I think Steven- 
142 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

son was guilty of an anachronism in 'Weir of 
Hermiston ' when he put it in the mouth of a 
young Scot. 

If the Scotch have followed the evil example 
of the English in misusing nasty, the English in 
turn have twisted the ilk of North Britain to 
serve their own ends. Of that ilk is a phrase 
added to a man's surname to show that this 
name and the name of his estate are the same; 
thus Bradwardine of Bradwardine would be 
called "Bradwardine of that ilk.'' But it is not 
uncommon now to see a phrase like " people of 
that ilk," meaning obviously "people of that 
sort." 

In like manner awful and terrible and elegant 
have been so misused as mere intensives that a 
careful writer now strikes them out when they 
come off the end of his pen in their original 
meaning. So quite no longer implies completely 
but is almost synonymous with somewhat— 
quite poor meaning somewhat poor and quite 
good meaning pretty good. Unique is getting to 
imply merely excellent or perhaps only unusual; 
its exact etymological value is departing forever. 
Creole, which should be applied only to Cauca- 
sian natives of tropical countries born of Latin 
parents, is beginning to carry with it in the vul- 
gar tongue of to-day a vague suspicion of negro 
blood. 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

While the perversion of nice and nasty is British, 
there is an American perversion of dirt not unlike 
it. To most Americans, I think, dirt suggests 
earth or soil or clay or dust; to most Americans, 
I think, dirt no longer carries with it any sug- 
gestion of dirtiness. I have heard a mother 
send her little boy off to make mud-pies on con- 
dition that he used only "clean dirt"; and I 
know that a lawn-tennis ground of compacted 
earth is called a dirt court. Yet, tho the noun 
has thus been defecated, the adjective keeps 
its earlier force; and there even lingers some- 
thing of the pristine value in the noun itself 
when it is employed in the picturesque idiom 
of the Rocky Mountains, where to be guilty of 
an underhand injury against any one is to do 
him dirt. Lovers of Western verse will recall 
how the frequenters of Casey's table d'hote 
went to see ''Modjesky as Cameel," and how 
they sat in silence until the break occurs between 
the lover and his mistress: 

At that Three-fingered Hoover says: " I '11 chip into this game, 
And see if Red Hoss Mountain cannot reconstruct the same. 
I won't set by and see the feelin's of a lady hurt— 
Gol durn a critter, anyhow, that does a woman dirt ! " 

Here no doubt, we have crossed the confines 
of slang; but having done so, 1 venture upon an 
anecdote which will serve to show how com- 
144 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

pletely sometimes the newer meaning of a word 
substitutes itself for the older. Two friends of 
mine were in a train of the elevated railroad, 
passing through that formerly craggy part of 
upper New York which was once called Shanty- 
town and which now prefers to be known as 
Harlem. One of them drew the attention of the 
other to the capering young capricorns that 
sported over the blasted rocks by the side of the 
lofty track. "Just look at those kids," were the 
words he used. He was overheard by a boy of 
the streets sitting in the next seat, who glanced 
out of the window at once, but failed to discover 
the children he expected to behold. Whereupon 
he promptly looked up and corrected my friend. 
"Them 's not kids," declared the urchin of Man- 
hattan; "them 's little goats! " In the mind of 
this native youngster there was no doubt at all 
as to the meaning of the word kid ; to him it 
meant child ; and he would have scorned any 
explanation that it ever had xne^inX young goat. 

In ignorance is certainty, and with increase of 
wisdom comes hesitancy. For example, what 
does the word romantic really mean } Few ad- 
jectives are harder worked in the history of 
modern literature; and no two of those who use 
it would agree upon its exact context. It sug- 
gests one set of circumstances to the student of 
English literature, a second set to a student of 
145 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

German literature, and a third to a student of 
French literature; while every student of com- 
parative literature must echo Professor Kuno 
Francke's longing for "the formation of an in- 
ternational league for the suppression of the 
terms both romanticism and classicism.'' 

Other words there are almost as ambiguous— 
philology, for example, and college and chapel. 
By classical philology we understand the study 
of all that survives of the civilizations of Greece 
and Rome, their languages, their literature, their 
laws, their arts. But has Romance philology or 
Germanic philology so broad a basis ? Has Eng- 
lish philology ? To nine out of ten of us, this use 
of the word now seems to put stress on the 
study of linguistics as against the study of liter- 
ature; to ninety-nine out of a hundred, I think, 
philologist suggests the narrow student of lin- 
guistics; and therefore the wider meaning seems 
likely soon to fall into innocuous desuetude. 

The change in the application of college is still 
in process of accomplishment. In England a 
college was a place of instruction, sometimes 
independent (as Eton College, in which case it is 
really a high school) and sometimes a compo- 
nent part of a university (in which case the rest 
of the organization is not infrequently non-exis- 
tent). An English university is not unlike a 
federation of colleges; and the relation of Merton 
146 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

and Magdalen to Oxford is not unlike that of 
Massachusetts and Virginia to the United States. 
In America college and university were long 
carelessly confused, as tho they were intercon- 
vertible terms ; but of late a sharp distinction is 
being set up— a distinction quite different from 
that obtaining in England. In this new Ameri- 
can usage, a college is a place where undergradu- 
ates are trained, and a university is a place where 
graduate-students are guided in research. Thus 
the college gives breadth, and the university adds 
depth. Thus the college provides general culture 
and the university provides the opportunity of 
specialization. If we accept this distinction,— 
and it has been accepted by all those who discuss 
the higher education in America, — we are forced 
to admit that the most of the self-styled univer- 
sities of this country should be called colleges; 
and we are allowed to observe that the college 
and the university can exist side by side in the 
same institution, as at Harvard and at Columbia. 
We are forced also to admit that what is known 
in Great Britain as " University Extension " can- 
not fairly retain that title here in the United 
States, since its object is not the extension of 
university work, as we now understand the 
word university here; it is at most the extension 
of college work. 
While this modification of the meaning of col- 

•47 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

lege is being made in America, a modification of 
chapel has been made in England. At first 
chapel described a subordinate part of a church, 
devoted to special services. By natural extension 
it came to denote a smaller edifice subsidiary to 
a large church, as Grace Church, in New York, 
was once a chapel of Trinity Church. But in the 
nineteenth century chapel came to be applied in 
England especially to the humbler meeting-houses 
of the various sects of dissenters, while church is 
reserved for the places of worship of the estab- 
lished religion. Thus Sir Walter Besant classifies 
the population of a riverside parish in London 
into those who go to church and those who go 
to chapel, having no doubt that all his British 
readers will understand the former to be Episco- 
palians and the latter Methodists or the like. 

This is a Briticism not likely ever to be adopted 
in America. But another Briticism bids fair to 
have a better fortune. Living as they do on a 
little group of islands, the British naturally are in 
the habit of referring to the rest of Europe as the 
Continent. They run across the Channel to take 
a little tour " on the Continent." They speak of 
the pronunciation of Latin that obtains every- 
where but in Great Britain and Ireland as the 
continental pronunciation. When they wish to 
differentiate their authors, for instance, from the 
French and the German and the Italians, they 
148 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

lump these last together as the continental authors. 
The division of Europe into continental and 
British is so convenient that it is certain to be 
adopted on this side of the Atlantic. Already has 
a New York literary review, after having had a 
series of papers on " Living Critics " (in which 
were included both British writers and American), 
followed it with a series of " Living Continental 
Critics " (in which the chief critics of France, 
Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia were consid- 
ered). Yet there is no logic in this use of the 
word over here, since we Americans are not in- 
sular; and since North America is a continent just 
as Europe is. As it happens, the word continen- 
tal in a wholly contradictory meaning is glorious 
in the history of the United States. Who does 
not know how, 

In their ragged regimentals, 
Stood the old Continentals, 
Yielding not ? 

None the less will the convenience of this 
British use of the word outweigh its lack of logic 
in America— as convenience has so often over- 
ridden far more serious considerations. Lan- 
guage is only a tool, after all; and it must ever 
be shaped to fit the hand that uses it. This is 
why another illogical misuse of a word will get 
itself recognized as legitimate sooner or later— 
149 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

the limitations of A^nerican to mean only that 
which belongs to the United States. When we 
speak of American ideas we intend to exclude 
not only the ideas of South America but also 
those of Mexico and of Canada; we are really 
arrogating to ourselves a supremacy so over- 
whelming as to warrant our ignoring altogether 
all the other peoples having a right to share in 
the adjective. Our reason for this is that there 
is no national adjective available for us. We can 
speak of Mexican ideas and of Canadian ideas ; 
but we cannot— or at least we do not and we 
will not— speak of United Statesian ideas. And 
this appropriation to ourselves of an adjective 
really the property of all the inhabitants of the 
continent seems to be perfectly acceptable to the 
only other group of those inhabitants speaking 
our language, —the English colonists to the north 
of us. On both sides of the Niagara River the 
smaller brother of the gigantic Horseshoe cataract 
is known as the ''American fall." Even in the 
last century the British employed American to 
indicate the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies; 
and Dr. Johnson wrote in 1 775 : '' That the Ameri- 
cans are able to bear taxation is indubitable." 
But our ownership of American as a national 
adjective, if tolerated by the Canadians and the 
British, is not admitted by those who do not 
speak our language. Probably to both the Ital- 
150 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

ians and the Spaniards South America rather than 
North is the part of the world that rises in the 
mental vision when the word American is sud- 
denly pronounced. 

Another distinction not unlike this, but logical 
as well as convenient, is getting itself recognized. 
This distinction results from accepting the 
obvious fact that the literature of the English 
language has nowadays two independent divi- 
sions—that produced in the British Isles and that 
produced in the United States. The writers of 
both nations speak the English language, and 
therefore their works— whensoever these rise to 
the level of literature— belong to English litera- 
ture. We are wont to call one division Ameri- 
can literature, and we are beginning to see that 
logic will soon force us to call the other division 
British literature. Mr. Stedman has dealt with 
the poetry of the English language of the past 
sixty years in two volumes, one on the * Vic- 
torian Poets,' and the other on the 'Poets of 
America,' and this serves to show how sharp is 
the line of separation. With his customary care- 
fulness of epithet, Mr. Stedman in the preface to 
the earlier volume always uses British as the 
antithesis of American, reserving English as the 
broader adjective to cover both branches of our 
literature. Probably the many collections of the 
* British Poets,' the ' British Novelists,' the * British 

151 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Theater,' were so called to allow the inclusion of 
works produced in the sister kingdoms ; it is well 
to remember that Scott and Moore were neither 
of them Englishmen. There is a certain piquancy 
in the fact that the adjective British, available in 
the beginning of the nineteenth century because 
it included the Scotch and the Irish, is even more 
useful at the end of the nineteenth century be- 
cause it differentiates the English, Scotch, and 
Irish, taken all together, from the Americans. 

Telegram was denounced as a mismade word, 
and cablegram was rejected with abhorrence by 
all defenders of purity. Yet the firm establish- 
ment of telegraph and telephone made certain the 
ultimate acceptance of telegram. But cablegram 
is still on probation, and may fail of admission in 
the end, perhaps, because a part of the word 
seems to be better fitted for its purpose than the 
whole. A message received by the telegraph 
under the ocean is often curtly called a cable, as 
when a man says, " I Ve just had a cable from 
my wife in Paris." This, I think, is rather 
American than British; but it is akin to the 
British use of wire as synonymous with both 
telegram and to telegraph. An Englishman invites 
you to a house-party, and writes that he will meet 
you at the station '* on a wire," intending to con- 
vey to you his desire that you should telegraph 
him the hour of your arrival. In a short story by 
152 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Mr. Henry James, that most conscientious of 
recorders of British speech, he tells us that after 
wires and coimterwires one of the characters of 
his tale was at last able to arrive at the house 
where the action takes place. The locution is 
hot from the verbal foundry; and it seems to 
imply what an American writer would have ex- 
pressed by saying that there had been '' tele- 
graphing to and fro." 

American, probably, is the verb to process, and 
also its past participle processed. When new 
methods of photo-engraving were introduced 
here in the United States, a black-and-white 
artist would express a preference either to have 
his drawing engraved on wood or have it repro- 
duced mechanically by a photo-engraving pro- 
cess; and as he needed a brief word to describe 
this latter act, one was promptly forthcoming, 
and he asked, " Is this thing of mine to be 
engraved or processed?'' The word half-tone 
seems also to be of American manufacture; and 
it describes one of these methods of photo-en- 
graving. It is not only a noun, but also, on occa- 
sions, a verb; and the artist will ask if his wash- 
drawing is to be half-toned. Of necessity the 
several improvements in the art of photo-engrav- 
ing brought with them a variety of new terms 
absolutely essential in the terminology of the 
craft, most of them remaining hidden in the 
^53 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

technical vocabulary, altho now and again one 
or another has thrust itself up into the general 
language. 

Any attempt to declare the British or the 
American origin of an idiom is most precarious; 
and he who ventures upon it has need of double 
caution. When a friend of mine asked the boy 
at the door of the club if it was still raining, and 
was answered, ''No, sir; it ' s fairing up nov^ ," 
he was at first inclined to think that he had cap- 
tured an Americanism hitherto unknown and 
delightfully fresh ; but he consulted the Century 
Dictionary, only to find that it was a Scoticism, 
—there was even a quotation from Stevenson's 
* Inland Voyage, '—and that it was not uncommon 
in the southwestern states. And when Captain 
Mahan brought out the difference between pre- 
paration for war and preparedness for war, this 
friend was ready to credit the naval historian with 
the devising not only of a most valuable distinc- 
tion but also of a most useful word; but a dip 
into the Century Dictionary again revealed that 
a Scotchman had not waited for an American to 
use the word, and that it had been employed by 
Bain, not even as tho it was a novelty. 

Once in the pages of Hawthorne, who was 

affluent in words and artistically adroit in his 

management of them, 1 met a phrase that pleased 

me mightily, " a heterogeny of things " ; and I find 

154 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

heterogeny duly collected in the Century Dic- 
tionary but without any quotation from Haw- 
thorne. Another word of Hawthorne's in the 
' Blithedale Romance ' is improvahility : " In my 
own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think 
better of the world's improvahility than it de- 
served." This I fancy may be Hawthorne's very 
own; but it is in the Century Dictionary, all 
the same, and without any indication of its origin. 
Quite possibly the New England romancer dis- 
interred it from some forgotten tome of the 
"somniferous school of literature," as he had 
humorously entitled the writings of his theologi- 
cal ancestors. 

There is a word of Abraham Lincoln's that I 
long for the right to use. Mr. Noah Brooks has 
recorded that he once heard the President speak 
of a certain man as interruptions. This adjective 
conveys a delicate shade of meaning not discov- 
erable in any other; it may not be inscribed in 
the bead-roll of the King's English, but it was 
a specimen of the President's English; and has 
any Speech from the Throne in this century 
really rivaled the force and felicity of the Second 
Inaugural .? 

It was not the liberator of the negro but one of 

the freedmen themselves who made offhand use 

of a delicious word, for which it is probably 

hopeless for us to expect acceptance, however 

^55 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

useful the new term might prove. During a 
debate in the legislature of South Carolina in the 
Reconstruction days, a sable ally of the carpet- 
baggers rose to repel the taunts of his opponents, 
declaring energetically that he hurled back with 
scorn all their msinuendos. The word holds a 
middle ground between insinuation and innu- 
671 do ; and between the two it has scant chance 
of survival. But it is an amusing attempt, for all 
its failure; and it would have given pleasure to 
the author of ' Alice in Wonderland.' And how 
many of Lewis Carroll's own verbal innovations, 
wantonly manufactured for his sport, are likely 
to get themselves admitted into the language of 
literature } Chortle stands the best chance of 
them all, I think; and I believe that many a man 
has said that he chortled, with no thought of the 
British bard who ingeniously devised the quaint 
vocable. 

So Mr. W. S. Gilbert's burgle seems to be win- 
ning its way into general use. At first those who 
employed it followed the example of the comic 
lyrist, and did so with humorous intent; but of 
late it is beginning to serve those who are wholly 
devoid of humor. Perhaps the verb to burgle 
(from the noun burglar) supplied the analogy on 
which was made the verb to ush (from the noun 
usher). With my own ears I once heard a well- 
known clergyman in New York express the 
156 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

thanks of the congregation to ** the gentlemen 
who ush for us." 

It is well that strange uses like these do not 
win early acceptance into our speech— that there 
should be alert challengers at the portal to cry 
"Halt!" and to examine a newcomer's creden- 
tials. It is well also that the stranger should 
have leave to prove his usefulness and so in time 
gain admittance even to the inner sanctuary of 
the language. John Dryden discussed the recep- 
tion into English of new words and phrases with 
the sturdy common sense which was one of the 
characteristics most endearing him to us as a true 
type of the man of letters who was also a man of 
the world. "It is obvious," he wrote in his 
'Defense of the Epilog,' "that we have admitted 
many, some of which we wanted, and therefore 
our language is the richer for them, as it would 
be by importation of bullion; others are rather 
ornamental than necessary; yet by their admis- 
sion the language is become more courtly and 
our thoughts are better dressed." 

Historians of the language have had no diffi- 
culty in bringing together a mass of quotations 
from the British writers of the eighteenth cen- 
tury to show that they were then possessed of 
the belief that it was feasible and necessary to set 
bounds to the growth of English. They were 
afraid that the changes going on in the language 
»57 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

would make it ** impossible for succeeding ages 
to read or appreciate the literature produced." 
In his interesting and instructive lecture on the 
* Evolution of English Lexicography,' Dr. Murray 
remarks that " to us of a later age, with our fuller 
knowledge of the history of language, and our 
wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to 
be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge, 
such as have been opened to us since the birth 
of modern science, this notion seems childlike 
and pathetic. But it was eminently characteris- 
tic of the eighteenth century." 

It is small wonder therefore that this absurd 
notion infected two of the most characteristic 
figures of the eighteenth century— Johnson and 
Franklin. Dr. Johnson set forth in the plan of his 
dictionary that " one great end of this undertak- 
ing is to fix the English language." Even so 
shrewd a student of all things as was Franklin 
seems to have accepted this current fallacy. 
When he acknowledged the dedication of Noah 
Webster's ' Dissertations on the English Lan- 
guage,' he declared that he could not "but ap- 
plaud your zeal for preserving the purity of our 
language, both in its expressions and pronuncia- 
tion." Then, as tho to prove to us, once for all, 
the futility of all efforts to" fix the language" 
and to "preserve its purity," Franklin picks out 
half a dozen novelties of phrase and begs that 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

Webster will use his "authority in reprobating 
them." Among these innovations that Franl^lin 
disapproved of are improved, noticed, advocated, 
progressed, and opposed. 

This letter to Webster was written in 1 789 ; and 
already in 1760 Franklin had yielded to certain of 
David Hume's criticisms upon his parts of 
speech: *' I thank you for your friendly admoni- 
tion relating to some unusual words in the pam- 
phlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate 
and the colonize, since they are not in common 
use here, I give up as bad; for certainly in writ- 
ings intended for persuasion and for general in- 
formation, one cannot be too clear; and every 
expression in the least obscure is a fault. The 
unshakable, too, tho clear, I give up as rather 
low. The introducing new words, where we 
are already possessed of old ones sufficiently 
expressive, 1 confess must be generally wrong, 
as it tends to change the language." 

With all his intellect and all his insight and all 
his common sense— and with this most precious 
quality Franklin was better furnished than either 
Johnson or Dryden— he could not foresee that to 
notice and to advocate and to colonize were words 
without which the English language could not do 
its work in the world. And when he gives up 
unshakable " as rather low " he stands confessed 
as a contemporary of the men whom Fielding 
159 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

and Goldsmith girded at. In spite of the exam- 
ple of Steele and Addison, in spite of his own 
vigorous directness in ' Poor Richard ' and in all 
his political pamphlets, Franklin feels that there 
is and that there ought to be a wide gap between 
the English that is spoken and the English that is 
written. He did not perceive that spoken Eng- 
lish, with all its hazardous expressions, its 
clipped words, its violent metaphors, its pictur- 
esque slang, its slovenly clumsiness, is none the 
less the proving-ground of the literary vocabu- 
lary, which is forever tending to self-exhaustion. 
Nobody has better stated the wiser attitude of 
a writer toward the tools of his trade than Pro- 
fessor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive dis- 
cussion of ' What is Good English ? ' He begins 
by noting that " the English language, as a whole, 
is the richest of all modern tongues, and it is not 
to be bounded by the comparatively narrow 
limits of its literature. There exists, as well, the 
easy, fluent usage of conversation, and there is 
also the strong, simple, homely speech of the 
common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking 
of the soil, and having a sturdy power about it 
that is unsurpassable for downright force and 
blunt directness." And Professor Peck, having 
pointed out how an artist in words is free to 
avail himself of the term he needs from books or 
from life, declares that " the writer of the best 
1 60 



NEW WORDS AND OLD 

English is he whose language responds exactly to 
his mood and thought, now thundering and 
surging with the majestic words whose immedi- 
ate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing 
with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now 
forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the 
Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the 
easy lightness of our modern phrase." 
(1897-99) 



161 



VII 

THE NATURALIZATION OF 
FOREIGN WORDS 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN 
WORDS 

WHEN Taine was praising that earliest of an- 
alytical novels, the ' Princess of Cleves,' he 
noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette's 
style. " Half of the words we use are unknown 
to Madame de Lafayette," he declared. "She 
is like the painters of old, who could make every 
shade with only five or six colors." And he as- 
serts that ''there is no easier reading" than this 
story of Madame de Lafayette's; "a child could 
understand without effort all her expressions and 
all her phrases. . . . Nowadays every writer is 
a pedant, and every style is obscure. All of us 
have read three or four centuries, and three or 
four literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criti- 
cism have weighted us with their discoveries 
and their jargons." 

This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the 
strange phenomenons of the nineteenth century 
was the sudden and enormous swelling of our 
vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dic- 
tionary is even more obvious in English than in 
French, for there are now three times as many 
165 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

human beings using the language of Shakspere 
as there are now using the language of Moliere; 
and while the speakers of French are compacted 
in one country and take their tone from its cap- 
ital, the speakers of English are scattered in the 
four quarters of the earth, and they use each 
man his own speech in his own fashion. From 
the wider variety of interests among those who 
speak English, our language is perforce more 
hospitable to foreign words than French needs to 
be, since it is used rather by a conservative peo- 
ple who prefer to stay at home. 

Perhaps the French are at times even too in- 
hospitable to the foreign phrase. A friend of 
mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bour- 
get's 'Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine,' 
fresh from the perusal of the German philoso- 
phers, told me that he was pained by M. Bour- 
get's vain effort to express the thoughts the 
French author had absorbed from the Germans. 
It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for 
speech, and could not say what was in his mind 
for lack of words in his native tongue capable of 
conveying his meaning. Of course it must be 
remembered that German philosophy is vague 
and fluctuating, and that the central thought is 
often obscured by a penumbra, while French is 
the most precise of languages. Those who are 
proud of it have declared that what is not clear 
166 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

is not French. When Hegel was asked by a 
traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his 
system of philosophy, he smiled and answered 
that it could not be explained summarily — 
"especially in French!" 

The English language extends a warmer wel- 
come to the foreign term, and also exercises more 
freely its right to make a word for itself when- 
ever one is needed. The manufactured article is 
not always satisfactory, but if it gets into general 
use, no further evidence is required that it was 
made to supply a genuine want. Scientist, for 
example, is an ugly word (altho an invention of * 
Whewell's), andyet it was needed. How neces- 
sary it was can be seen by any reader of the late 
F. W. H. Myers's essay on ' Science and a Future 
Life,' who notes that Myers refused resolutely 
to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning 
the author wanted, and that the British writer 
preferred to employ instead the French savant, 
which does not — etymologically at least — con- 
tain his full intention. Myers's fastidiousness 
did not, however, prevent his using creation- 
ist 2iS an adjective, and also bonism as a substitute 
for optimism, ** with no greater barbarism in the 
form of the word and more accuracy in the 
meaning." 

Just as Myers used savant so Ruskin was will- 
ing to arrest the rhythm of a fine passage by the 
167 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

obtrusion of two French words : *' A well-edu- 
cated gentleman may not know many languages; 
may not be able to speak any but his own ; may 
have read very few books. But whatever lan- 
guage he knows, he knows precisely; whatever 
word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly ; 
above all, he is learned in the peerage of words ; 
knows the words of true descent and ancient 
blood at a glance from words of modern ca- 
naille ; remembers all their ancestry, their inter- 
marriages, distantest relationships, and the ex- 
tent to which they were admitted, and offices 
they hold among the national noblesse of words, 
at any time and in any country." There seems 
to be little or no excuse for the employment here 
of noblesse = nobility ; and as for canaille, per- 
haps Ruskin held that to be a French word on 
the way to become an English word — a natural- 
ization not likely to take place without a marked 
modification of the original pronunciation, which 
is difficult for the English mouth. 

Every one who loves good English cannot but 
have a healthy hatred for the style of a writer 
who insists on bespattering his pages with alien 
words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more 
tolerant, I think, toward a term taken from one of 
the dead languages than toward one derived from 
any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop 
who liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sen- 

i68 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

tence was oversanguine in his explanation that 
"everybody knows a little Hebrew." It is said 
that even a Latin quotation is now no longer 
certain to be recognized in the British House of 
Commons; and yet it was a British statesman 
who declared that, ahho there was no necessity 
for a gentleman to know Latin, he ought at least 
to have forgotten it. 

For a bishop to quote Hebrew is now pedantic, 
no doubt, and even for the inferior clergy to 
quote Latin. It is pedantic, but it is not indeco- 
rous; whereas a French quotation in the pulpit, 
or even the use of a single French word, like 
savant, for example, would seem to most of us 
almost a breach of the proprieties. It would 
strike us, perhaps, not merely as a social solecism, 
but somehow as morally reprehensible. A 
preacher who habitually cited French phrases 
would be in danger of the council. To picture 
Jonathan Edwards as using the language of Vol- 
taire is impossible. That a French quotation 
should seem more incongruous in the course of 
a religious argument than a Latin, a Greek, or a 
Hebrew quotation, is perhaps to be ascribed to the 
fact that many of us hold the Parisians to be a more 
frivolous people than the Romans, the Athenians, 
or the Israelites ; and as the essay of Mr. Myers 
was a religious argument, this may be one reason 
why his employment oi savant was unfortunate. 
169 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

Another reason is suggested by Professor 
Dowden's shrewd remark that "a word, like a 
comet, has a tail as well as a head." An adroit 
craftsman in letters is careful always that the 

connotations of the terms he chooses shall be in 
accord with the tone of his thesis. It may be 
disputed whether savant denotes the same thing 
as scientist, but it can hardly be denied that 
the connotations of the two words are wholly 
different. For my own part, some lingering 
memory of Abbott's 'Napoleon,' absorbed in 
boyhood, links the wise men of France with 
the donkeys of Egypt, because whenever the 
Mameluke cavalry threatened the French squares 
the cry went up, "Asses and savants to the 
center! " 

After all, it is perhaps rather a question whether 
or not savant is now an English noun. There 
are many French words knocking at the door of 
the English language and asking for admission. 
Is littoral for shore now an English noun } Is 
blond an English adjective meaning light-haired 
and opposed to hnmette ? Is brunette itself really 
Anglicized ? (1 ask this in spite of the fact that a 
friend of mine once read in a country newspaper 
a description of a brunette horse.) Has inedited 
for unpublished won its way into our language 
finally } Lowell gave it his warrant, at least by 
using it in his * Letters ' ; but I confess that it has 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

always struck me as liable to confusion with 
unedited. 

Foreign words must always be allowed to 
land on our coasts without a passport; yet if any 
of them linger long enough to warrant a belief 
that they may take out their papers sooner or 
later, we must decide at last whether or not they 
are likely to be desirable residents of our diction- 
ary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we 
may fairly enough insist on their renouncing their 
foreign allegiance. They must cast in their lot 
with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws 
only. The French chaperon, for example, has 
asked for admission to our vocabulary, and the 
application has been granted, so that we have 
now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller 
was chaperoned by Becky Sharp at the last ball 
given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we have 
even changed the spelling of the noun to corre- 
spond better with our Anglicized pronunciation, 
thus chaperone. Thus technique has changed its 
name to technic, and is made welcome; so early 
as 1867 Matthew Arnold used technic in his 
* Study of Celtic Literature,' but even now his fel- 
low-islanders are slow in following his example. 
Thus employe is accepted in the properly Angli- 
cized form of employee. Thus the useful cloture 
undergoes a sea-change and becomes the English 
closure. And why not cotery also } I note that 
171 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

in his 'Studies in Literature,' published in 1877, 
Professor Dowden put technique into italics as 
tho it was still a foreign word, while he left 
coterie in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted 
into English. 

So toilette has been abbreviated to toilet ; at 
least, I should have said so without any hesita- 
tion if I had not recently seen the foreign spelling 
reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert 
Louis Stevenson's 'Amateur Emigrant' — and 
this in the complete Edinburgh edition prepared 
by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling 
in the British prose of Stevenson is a surprise, 
especially since the author of the 'Dynamiter' is 
on record as a contemner of another orthographic 
Gallicism. In a foot-note to ' More New Arabian 
Nights ' Stevenson declares that "any writard 
who writes dynamitard shall find in me a never- 
resting fightard." 

I should like to think that the naturalized litera- 
tor was supplanting the alien litterateur, but I 
cannot claim confidence as to the result. Litera- 
tor is a good English word : I have found it in 
the careful pages of Lockhart's ' Life of Scott ' ; 
and I make no doubt that it can prove a much 
older pedigree than that. It seems to me a bet- 
ter word by far than literarian, which the late 
Fitzedward Hall manufactured for his own use 
"some time in the fifties," and which he de- 
172 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

fended against a British critic who denounced 
it as "atrocious." Hall, praising the word of 
his own making, declared that "to liter atus ox 
literator, for literary person or a longer phrase 
of equivalent import, there are obvious objec- 
tions." Nobody, to the best of my belief, ever 
attempted to use in English the Latin literatus, 
altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by 
his series of papers on the ' Literati of America.' 
Since Poe's death the word has ceased to be cur- 
rent, altho it was not uncommon in his day. 

Perhaps one of the obvious objections to liter- 
atus is that if it be treated as an English word the 
plural it forms is not pleasant to the ear — liter a- 
tuses. Here, indeed, is a moot point : How 
does a foreign word make its plural in English ? 
Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing, writing in 
Harper's Ba^ar on the college education of 
young women, spoke of foci. Mr. Churton 
Collins, preparing a book about the study of 
English literature in the British universities, 
expressed his desire "to raise Greek, now gradu- 
ally falling out of our curricula and degenerating 
into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pe- 
dants, to its proper place in education." Here 
we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins treating 
focus and curriculum as words not yet assimi- 
lated by our language, and therefore required 
to assume the Latin plural. 
173 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on 
the part of these writers ? \i focus and curricu- 
lum are not good English words, what need is 
there to employ them when you are using the 
English language to convey your thoughts ? 
There are occasions, of course, where the em- 
ployment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they 
must always be very rare. The imported word 
which we really require we had best take to 
ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treat- 
ing it thereafter absolutely as an English word, and 
giving it the regular English plural. If the word 
we use is so foreign that we should print it in 
italics, then of course the plural should be formed 
according to the rules of the foreign language 
from which it has been borrowed ; but if it has 
become so acclimated in our tongue that we 
should not think of underlining it, then surely it 
is English enough to take an English plural. If 
cherub is now English, its plural is the English 
cherubs, and not the Hebrew cherubim. If cri- 
terion is now English, its plural is the English 
criterions, and not the Greek criteria. \i formula 
is now English, its plural is the English formulas, 
and not the Latin formulce. If bureau is now 
English, its plural is the English bureaus, and 
not the French bureaux. 

What is the proper plural in English oi cactus? 
of vortex ? of antithesis ? of phenomenon ? In a 
174 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

volume on the 'Augustan Age,' in Professor 
George Saintsbury's ' Periods of Europe^.n Litera- 
ture,' we find lexica — a masterpiece of petty 
pedantry and of pedantic pettiness. As Landor 
made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon 
Hare, "There is an affectation of scholarship in 
compilers of spelling-books, and in the authors 
they follow for examples, when they bring for- 
ward phenomena and the like. They might as 
well bring forward mysteria. We have no right 
to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their 
grammars : we need no vortices when we have 
vortexes before us ; and while we have memoran- 
dums, factotums, and ultimatums, let our shep- 
herd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as 
have wandered from the flock." 

Landor's own scholarship was too keen and 
his taste was too fine for him not to abhor such af- 
fectation. He held that Greek and Latin words 
had no business in an English sentence unless 
they had been frankly acclimated in the English 
language, and that one of the conditions of this 
acclimatizing was the shedding of their original 
plurals. And that this is also the common-sense 
view of most users of English is obvious enough. 
Nobody now ventures to write factota or ulti- 
mata ; and even memoranda seems to be vanish- 
ing. "^wX. phenomena and data still survive; and 
so do errata and candelabra. Whatever may 
»75 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

be the fate oi phenomena, that of the three other 
words may perhaps be like unto the fate of opera 
— which is also a Latin plural and which has 
become an English singular. We speak unhesi- 
tatingly of the operas of Rossini ; are we going, 
in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the cande- 
labras of Cellini ? In his vigorous article on the 
orthography of the French language — which is 
still almost as chaotic and illogical as the orthog- 
raphy of the English language — Sainte-Beuve 
noted as a singular peculiarity the fact that errata 
had got itself recognized as a French singular, 
but that it did not yet take the French plural; 
thus we see un errata and des errata. 

It is true also that when we take over a term 
from another language we ought to be sure 
that it really exists in the other language. For 
lack of observance of this caution we find our- 
selves now in possession of phrases like nom 
de plume and deshabille, of which the French 
never heard. And even when we have assured 
ourselves of the existence of the word in the 
foreign language, it behooves us then to as- 
sure ourselves also of its exact meaning before we 
take it for our own. In his interesting and in- 
structive book about 'English Prose,' Professor 
Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte- 
Bowe is not yet an extinct species; and he adds 
in a note that " the word levee seems to be another 
176 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

genuine instance of the same insular dialect," 
since it is not French of any date, but an English 
improvement upon the verb (or substantive) 
lever y ''getting up in the morning." 

An example even more extraordinary than any 
of these, I think, will occur to those of us who 
are in the habit of glancing through the theatrical 
announcements of the American newspapers. 
This is the taking of the French word vaudeville 
to designate what was once known as a ** variety 
show " and what is now more often called a 
** specialty entertainment." For any such inter- 
pretation of vaudeville there is no warrant what- 
ever in French. Originally the ** vaudeville" 
was a satiric ballad, bristling with hits at the 
times, and therefore closely akin to the ** topical 
song" of to-day; and it is at this stage of its 
evolution that Boileau asserted that 

Le Franfais, ne malin, crea le vaudeville. 

In time there came to be spoken words accom- 
panying those sung, and thus the "vaudeville" 
expanded slowly into a little comic play in which 
there were one or more songs. Of late the 
Parisian ''vaudeville" has been not unlike the 
London "musical farce." At no stage of its ca- 
reer had the "vaudeville" anything to do with 
the "variety show"; and yet to the average 
American to-day the two words seem synony- 
177 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

mous. There was even organized in New York, 
in the fall of 1892, a series of subscription sup- 
pers during which ''specialty entertainments" 
were to be given; and in spite of the fact that 
the organizers were presumably persons who had 
traveled, they called their society the "Vaude- 
ville Club," altho no real "vaudeville" was ever 
presented before the members during its brief 
and inglorious career. Of course explanation 
and protest are now equally futile. The mean- 
ing of the word is forever warped beyond cor- 
rection; and for the future here in America a 
"vaudeville performance" is a "variety show," 
no matter what it may be or may have been in 
France. When the people as a whole accept a 
word as having a certain meaning, that is and 
must be the meaning of the word thereafter; 
and there is no use in kicking against the pricks. 
The fate in English of another French term is 
even now trembling in the balance. This is the 
word n6e. The French have found a way out of 
the diificulty of indicating easily the maiden name 
of a married woman ; they write unhesitatingly 
about Madame Machin, nee Chose; and the Ger- 
mans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a 
hint from the French and the Germans, and thus 
of speaking about Mrs. Brown, horn Gray, as they 
do, not a few English writers have simply bor- 
rowed the actual French word, and so we read 
178 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

about Mrs. Black, nee White. As usual, this bor- 
rowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems 
to be irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of 
nee by using it in the sense of ' * formerly. " Thus 
in the ' Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88,' col- 
lected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell, 
the editor supplies in foot-notes information about 
the persons whose names appear in the corre- 
spondence. In one of these annotations we read 
that the wife of Sir Anthony de Rothschild was 
" ne'e Louisa Montefiore" (i. 165), and in another 
that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was ''nee Annie 
de Rothschild" (ii. 160). Now, neither of these 
ladies was born with a given name as well as 
a family name. It is obvious that the editor 
has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning 
of nee to suit his own convenience, a proceed- 
ing of which I venture to think that Mat- 
thew Arnold himself would certainly have dis- 
approved. In fact, I doubt if Mr. Russell is not 
here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious as 
that charged against a wealthy western lady now 
residing at the capital of the United States, who 
is said to have written her name on the register of 
a New York hotel thus: "Mrs. Blank, Washing- 
ton, nee Chicago." 

Why is it that the wandering stars of the the- 
atrical firmament are wont to display themselves 
in a repertoire when it would be so much easier 
179 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

for them to make use of a repertory ? And why 
does the teacher of young and ambitious singers 
insist on calling his school a conservatoire when 
it would assert its rank just as well if it was 
known as a conservatory ? What strange freak 
of chance has led so many of the women who 
have made themselves masters of the technic of 
the piano to announce themselves as pianistes in 
the vain belief that pianiste is the feminine of 
pianist? How comes it that a man capable of 
composing so scholarly a book as the 'Greek 
Drama ' of Mr. Lionel D. Barnett really is should 
be guilty of saying that certain declamations in 
the later theater '' were adapted to the style of 
popular artistes" ? And why does Mr. Andrew 
Lang (in his 'Angling Sketches') write about the 
asphalte, when the obvious English is either 
asphalt or asphaltum ? 

And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this 
dereliction, has no hesitation in objecting to a 
"delightful grammatical form which closes a 
scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The 
author gets his characters off the stage with the 
announcement: 'They exit.' He seems to think 
that exit is a verb. I exit, he exits, they exit. It 
would be interesting to learn how he translates 
exeunt omnes. One is accustomed to ' a penetra- 
lia' from young lions, and to 'a strata,' but 
'they exit' is original." 

1 80 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

But the verb to exit is not original with the 
writer in the new rag-bag journal. It has been 
current in England for three quarters of a century 
at least, and it can be found in the pages of that 
vigorously written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trol- 
lope's * Domestic Manners of the Americans ' 
(published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in 
which she describes how the American women, 
left alone, *'all console themselves together for 
whatever they may have suffered in keeping 
awake by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake 
and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake, waffle-cake 
and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved 
cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce, 
and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in 
any other country of the known world. After 
this massive meal is over, they return to the 
drawing-room, and it always appeared to me 
that they remained together as long as they could 
bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, 
shawl, and exit." 

The verb to exit, with the full conjugation Mr. 
Lang thought so strange, has long been common 
among theatrical folk. The stage-manager will 
tell the leading lady " You exit here, and she ex- 
its up left." The theatrical folk, who probably 
first brought the verb into use, did not borrow it 
from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose ; 
they simply made a verb of the existing English 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

noun exit, meaning a way out. We old New- 
Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum's 
Museum stood at the corner of Broadway and 
Ann Street, remember also the signs which used 
to declare 



THIS WAY 

TO THE 

GRAND EXIT 



and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of 
the countryman who went wonderingly to dis- 
cover what manner of strange beast the "exit" 
might be, and who unexpectedly found himself 
in the street outside. 

The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due 
to his happening not to recall the fact that exit 
had become, first, an English noun, and, sec- 
ond, an English verb. When once it was An- 
glicized, it had all the rights of a native ; it was 
a citizen of no mean country. The principle 
which it is well to keep in mind in any con- 
sideration of the position in English of terms 
once foreign is that no word can serve two 
masters. The English language is ever rav- 
enous and voracious ; its appetite is insatiable. 
It is forever taking over words from strange 
tongues, dead and alive. These words are but 
182 



THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS 

borrowed at first, and must needs conform to 
all the grammatical peculiarities of their native 
speech. But some of them are sooner or later 
firmly incorporated into English ; and thereafter 
they must cease to obey any laws but those of 
the language into which they have been adopted. 
Either a word is English or it is not ; and a de- 
cision on this point is rarely difficult. 
(1895-1900) 



183 



VllI 
THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

IT is characteristic of the interest which science 
is now taking in things formerly deemed 
unworthy of consideration that philologists no 
longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. 
Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the 
amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who 
affected to despise slang. To the trained inves- 
tigator into the mutations of language and into 
the transformations of the vocabulary, no word 
is too humble for respectful consideration ; and it 
is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable 
lessons are learned. But until recently few men 
of letters ever mentioned slang except in dispar- 
agement and with a wish for its prompt extirpa- 
tion. Even professed students of speech, like 
Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn of their 
former authority), are abundant in declarations 
of abhorrent hostility. De Quincey, priding him- 
self on his independence and on his iconoclasm, 
was almost alone in saying a good word for 
slang. 

187 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

There is this excuse for the earlier author who 
treated slang with contumely, that the differen- 
tiation of slang from cant was not complete in 
his day. Cant is the dialect of a class, often 
used correctly enough, as far as grammar is con- 
cerned, but often also unintelligible to those who 
do not belong to the class or who are not ac- 
quainted with its usages. Slang was at first the 
cant of thieves, and this seems to have been its 
only meaning until well into the present century. 
In 'Redgauntlet,' for example, published in 1824, 
Scott speaks of the "thieves' Latin called slang." 
Sometime during the middle of the century 
slang seems to have lost this narrow limitation, 
and to have come to signify a word or a phrase 
used with a meaning not recognized in polite 
letters, either because it had just been invented, 
or because it had passed out of memory. While 
cant, therefore, was a language within a language, 
so to speak, and not to be understanded of the 
people, slang was a collection of colloquialisms 
gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike 
the bend sinister of illegitimacy. 

Certain of its words were unquestionably of 
very vulgar origin, being survivals of the ''thieves' 
Latin " Scott wrote about. Among these are pal 
and cove, words not yet admitted to the best 
society. Others were merely arbitrary misap- 
plications of words of good repute, such as the 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

employment of awfully and jolly as synonyms 
for very — as intensives, in short. Yet others 
were violent metaphors, like in the soup, kicking 
the bucket, holding up (a stage-coach). Others, 
again, were the temporary phrases which spring 
up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unac- 
countably for a few months, and then disappear 
forever, leaving no sign ; such as shoo-fly in 
America and all serene in England. 

An analysis of modern slang reveals the fact 
that it is possible to divide the words and phrases 
of which it is composed into four broad classes, 
of quite different origin and of very varying value. 
Toward two of these classes it may be allowable 
to feel the contempt so often expressed for slang 
as a whole. Toward the other two classes such a 
feeling is wholly unjustifiable, for they are per- 
forming an inestimable service to the language. 

Of the two unworthy classes, the first is that 
-which includes the survivals of the "thieves' 
Latin," the vulgar terms used by vulgar men to 
describe vulgar things. This is the slang which 
the police-court reporter knows and is fond of 
using profusely. This is the slang which Dick- 
ens introduced to literature. This class of slang 
it is which is mainly responsible for the ill repute 
of the word. Much of the dislike for slang felt 
by people of delicate taste is, however, due to 
the second class, which includes the ephemeral 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

phrases fortuitously popular for a season, and 
then finally forgotten once for all. These mere 
catchwords of the moment are rarely foul, as the 
words and phrases of the first class often are, but 
they are unfailingly foolish. There you go with 
your eye out, which was accepted as a humorous 
remark in London, and Where did you get that 
hat} which had a like fleeting vogue in New 
York, are phrases as inoffensive as they are flat. 
These temporary terms come and go, and are 
forgotten swiftly. Probably most readers of 
Forcythe Wilson's 'Old Sergeant' need now to 
have it explained to them that during the war a 
grape-vine meant a lying rumor. 

It must be said, however, that even In the 
terms of the first class there is a striving upward, 
a tendency to disinfect themselves, as any reader 
of Grose's ' Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue ' 
must needs remark when he discovers that 
phrases used now with perfect freedom had a 
secret significance in the last century. There 
are also innuendos not a few in certain of Shak- 
spere's best-known plays which fortunately es- 
cape the notice of all but the special student of 
the Elizabethan vocabulary. 

The other two classes of slang stand on a dif- 
ferent footing. Altho they suffer from the stig- 
ma attached to all slang by the two classes 
already characterized, they serve a purpose. In- 
190 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

deed, their utility is indisputable, and it was 
never greater than it is to-day. One of these 
classes consists of old and forgotten phrases or 
words, which, having long lain dormant, are 
now struggling again to the surface. The other 
consists of new words and phrases, often vigor- 
ous and expressive, but not yet set down in the 
literary lexicon, and still on probation. In these 
two classes we find a justification for the exist- 
ence of slang — for it is the function of slang to be 
a feeder of the vocabulary. Words get thread- 
bare and dried up; they come to be like evapo- 
rated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the 
duty of slang to provide substitutes for the good 
words and true which are worn out by hard 
service. And many of the recruits slang has 
enlisted are worthy of enrolment among the 
regulars. When a blinded conservative is called 
a mossbach, who is so dull as not to perceive the 
poetry of the word } When an actor tells us 
how the traveling company in which he was 
engaged got stranded, who does not recognize 
the force and the felicity of the expression } And 
when we hear a man declare that he would to- 
day be rich if only his foresight had been equal 
to his hindsight, who is not aware of the value 
of the phrase .? No wonder is it that the verbal 
artist hankers after such words which renew the 
lexicon of youth! No wonder is it that the 
191 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

writer who wishes to present his thought freshly 
seeks these words with the bloom yet on them, 
and neglects the elder words desiccated as tho 
for preservation in a herbarium ! 

The student of slang is surprised that he is 
able to bring forward an honorable pedigree for 
many words so long since fallen from their high 
estate that they are now treated as upstarts when 
they dare to assert themselves. Words have 
their fates as well as men and books; and the 
ups and downs of a phrase are often almost as 
pathetic as those of a man. It has been said that 
the changes of fortune are so sudden here in 
these United States that it is only three genera- 
tions from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The 
English language is not quite so fast as the Amer- 
ican people, but in the English language it is 
only three centuries from shirt sleeves to shirt 
sleeves. What could seem more modern, more 
western even, than deck for pack of cards, and to 
lay out or to lay out cold for to knockdown? Yet 
these are both good old expressions, in decay no 
longer, but now insisting on their right to a re- 
newed life. Deck is Elizabethan, and we find in 
Shakspere's 'King Henry VI.' (part iii., act v., 
sc, i.) that 

The king was slyly finger'd from the deck. 

To lay out in its most modern sense is very early 

English. 

192 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

Even more important than this third class of 
slang expressions is the fourth, containing the 
terms which are, so to speak, serving their ap- 
prenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or 
not they will be admitted finally into the gild 
of good English. These terms are either useful 
or useless; they either satisfy a need or they do 
not; they therefore live or die according to the 
popular appreciation of their value. If they ex- 
pire, they pass into the limbo of dead-and-gone 
slang, than which there is no blacker oblivion. If 
they survive it is because they have been received 
into the literary language, having appealed to the 
perceptions of some master of the art and craft 
of speech, under whose sponsorship they are ad- 
mitted to full rights. Thus we see that slang is 
a training-school for new expressions, only the 
best scholars getting the diploma which confers 
longevity, the others going surely to their fate. 

Sometimes these new expressions are words 
only, sometimes they are phrases. To go back 
on, for instance, and to give one's self away are 
specimens of the phrase characteristic of this 
fourth and most interesting class of slang at its 
best. In its creation of phrases like these, slang 
is what idiom was before language stiffened into 
literature, and so killed its earlier habit of idiom- 
making. After literature has arrived, and after 
the schoolmaster is abroad, and after the print- 
^9^ 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

ing-press has been set up in every hamlet, the 
idiom-making faculty of a language is atrophied 
by disuse. Slang is sometimes, and to a certain 
extent, a survival of this faculty, or at least a 
substitute for its exercise. In other words (and 
here I take the liberty of quoting from a private 
letter of one of the foremost authorities on the 
history of English, Professor Lounsbury), ** slang 
is an effort on the part of the users of language 
to say something more vividly, strongly, con- 
cisely than the language as existing permits it to 
be said"; and he adds that slang is therefore 
"the source from which the decaying energies 
of speech are constantly refreshed." 

Being contrary to the recognized standards of 
speech, slang finds no mercy at the hands of 
those who think it their duty to uphold the strict 
letter of the law. Nothing amazes an investiga- 
tor more, and nothing more amuses him, than 
to discover that thousands of words now secure 
in our speech were once denounced as interlo- 
pers. ''There is death in the dictionary," said 
Lowell, in his memorable linguistic essay pre- 
fixed to the second series of the ' Biglow Papers ' ; 
"and where language is too strictly limited by 
convention, the ground for expression to grow 
in is limited also, and we get a potted literature 
— Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees." 
And in the paper on Dryden he declared that "a 
194 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

language grows and is not made." Pedants are 
ever building the language about with rules of 
iron in a vain effort to keep it from growing 
naturally and according to its needs. 

It is true that cab and mob are clipped words, 
and there has always been a healthy dislike of any 
clipping of the verbal currency. But consols 
is firmly established. Two clipped words there 
are which have no friends — gents and pants. 
Dr. Holmes has put them in the pillory of a 
couplet : 

The things named pants, in certain documents, 
A word not made for gentlemen, but gents. 

And recently a sign, suspended outside a big 
Broadway building, announced that there were 
** Hands wanted on pants," the building being a 
clothing factory, and not, as one might suppose, 
a boys' school. 

The slang of a metropolis, be that where you 
will, in the United States or in Great Britain, in 
France or in Germany, is nearly always stupid. 
There is neither fancy nor fun in the Parisian's 
Ohe Lambert or on dirait du veau, nor in the 
Londoner's all serene or there you go with your 
eye out — catchwords which are humorous, if 
humorous they are, only by general consent and 
for some esoteric reason. It is to such stupid 
phrases of a fleeting popularity that Dr. Holmes 
^95 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

refers, no doubt, when he declares that ''the use 
of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a substitute 
for differentiated specific expressions is at once a 
sign and a cause of mental atrophy." And this 
use of slang is far more frequent in cities, where 
people often talk without having anything to say, 
than in the country, where speech flows slowly. 
Perhaps the more highly civilized a population 
is, the more it has parted with the power of pic- 
torial phrase-making. It may be that a certain 
lawlessness of life is the cause of a lawlessness of 
language. Of all metropolitan slang that of the 
outlaws is most vigorous. It was after Vidocq 
had introduced thieves' slang into polite society 
that Balzac, always a keen observer and always 
alert to pick up unworn words, ventured to say, 
perhaps to the astonishment of many, that 
"there is no speech more energetic, more colored, 
than that of these people." Balzac was not aca- 
demic in his vocabulary, and he owed not a little 
of the sharpness of his descriptions to his hatred 
of the cut-and-dried phrases of his fellow-novel- 
ists. He would willingly have agreed with 
Montaigne when the essayist declared that the 
language he liked, written or spoken, was '* a suc- 
culent and nervous speech, short and compact, 
not so much delicated and combed out as vehe- 
ment and brusk, rather arbitrary than monoto- 
nous, ... not pedantic, but soldierly rather, as 
196 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

Suetonius called Caesar's." And this brings us 
exactly to Mr. Bret Harte's 

Phrases such as camps may teach, 
Saber-cuts of Saxon speech, 

There is a more soldierly frankness, a greater 
freedom, less restraint, less respect for law and 
order, in the west than in the east; and this may 
be a reason why American slang is superior to 
British and to French. The catchwords of New 
York may be as inept and as cheap as the catch- 
words of London and of Paris, but New York is 
not as important to the United States as London 
is to Great Britain and as Paris is to France; it is 
not as dominating, not as absorbing. So it is 
that in America the feebler catchwords of the city 
give way before the virile phrases of the west. 
There is little to choose between the how 'syour 
poor feet? of London and the well, I should smile 
of New York, for neither phrase had any excuse 
for existence, and neither had any hope of sur- 
vival. The city phrase is often doubtful in mean- 
ing and obscure in origin. In London, for ex- 
ample, the four-wheel cab is called a growler. 
Why ? In New York a can brought in filled with 
beer at a bar-room is called a growler, and the 
act of sending this can from the private house to 
the public house and back is called working the 
growler. Why ? 

197 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

But when we find a western writer describing 
the effects of tanglefoot whisky, the adjective 
explains itself, and is justified at once. And we 
discover immediately the daringly condensed 
metaphor in the sign, "Don't monkey with the 
bti:(jl-saw " \ the picturesqueness of the word 
buii-saw and its fitness for service are visible at 
a glance. So we understand the phrase readily 
and appreciate its force when we read the story 
of 'Buck Fanshaw's Funeral,' and are told that 
''he never went back on his mother," or when 
we hear the defender of ' Banty Tim ' declare that 

" Ef one of you teches the boy 
He '11 "ivrestle his hash to-night in hell, 
Or my name 's not Tilman Joy." 

To wrestle one's hash is not an elegant expression, 
one must admit, and it is not likely to be adopted 
into the literary language ; but it is forcible at 
least, and not stupid. To go back on, however, 
bids fair to take its place in our speech as a 
phrase at once useful and vigorous. 

From the wide and wind-swept plains of the 
west came blinard, and altho it has been 
suggested that the word is a survival from some 
local British dialect, the west still deserves the 
credit of having rescued it from desuetude. From 
the logging-camps of the northwest came boom, 
an old word again, but with a new meaning 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

which the language promptly accepted. From 
still farther west came the use of sand to indicate 
staying power, backbone — what New England 
knows as grit and old England as pluck (a far 
less expressive word). From the southwest came 
cinch, from the tightening of the girths of the 
pack-mules, and so by extension indicating a 
grasp of anything so firm that it cannot get away. 
Just why a dead cinch should be the securest 
of any, I confess I do not know. Dead is here 
used as an intensive; and the study of intensives 
is as yet in its infancy. In all parts of Great 
Britain and the United States we find certain 
words wrenched from their true meaning and 
most arbitrarily employed to heighten the value 
of other words. Thus we have a dead cinch, or 
a dead sure thing, a dead shot, a dead level — and 
for these last two terms we can discover perhaps a 
reason. Lowell noted in New England a use of 
tormented as a euphemism for damned, as '* not 
a tormented cent." Every American traveler in 
England must have remarked with surprise the 
British use of the Saxon synonym of sanguinary 
as an intensive, the chief British rivals of bloody 
in this respect being blooming and blasted. All 
three are held to be shocking to polite ears, and 
it was with bated breath that the editor of a Lon- 
don newspaper wrote about the prospects of "a 

b y war"; while, as another London editor 

199 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

declared recently, it is now impossible for a cock- 
ney to read with proper sympathy Jeffrey's ap- 
peal to Carlyle, after a visit to Craigenputtock, to 
bring his ''blooming Eve out of her blasted para- 
dise." Of the other slang synonyms for very — 
jolly, ''he v^2is> jolly ill," is British; awfully was 
British first, and is now American also; and daisy 
is American. But any discussion of intensives is 
a digression here, and I return as soon as may be 
to the main road. 

To free:{e to anything or any person is a 
down-east phrase, so Lowell records, but it has 
a far-western strength; and so has to get solid 
with, as when the advice is given that "if a man 
is courting a girl it is best to get solid with her 
father." What is this phrase, however, but the 
French solidarite, which we have recently taken 
over into English to indicate a communion of in- 
terests and responsibilities } The likeness of 
French terms to American is no new thing; 
Lowell told us that Horace Mann, in one of his 
public addresses, commented at some length on 
the beauty and moral significance of the French 
phrase s'orienter, and called upon his young 
friends to practise it, altho "there was not a 
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not 
always been to find out what was about east, and 
to shape his course accordingly." A few years 
ago, in turning over 'Karikari,' a volume of M. 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

Ludovic Halevy's clever and charming sketches 
of Parisian character, I met with a delightful 
young lady who had pas pour deux liards de 
coqiietterie ; and I wondered whether M. Halevy, 
if he were an American, and one of the forty of 
an American Academy, would venture the asser- 
tion that his heroine was not coquettish for a 
cent. 

Closely akin to tofree:{e to and to be solid with is 
jumped on. When severe reproof is administered 
the culprit is said to be jumped on; and if the 
reproof shall be unduly severe, the sufferer is said 
then to be jumped on with both feet. All three 
of these phrases belong to a class from which 
the literary language has enlisted many worthy 
recruits in the past, and it would not surprise me 
to see them answer to their names whenever a 
new dictionary calls the roll of English words. 
Will they find themselves shoulder to shoulder 
with spook, a word of Dutch origin, now volun- 
teering for English service both in New York 
and in South Africa ? And by that time will 
slump have been admitted to the ranks, and fad, 
and crank, in the secondary meaning of a man of 
somewhat unsettled mind ? Slump is an Ameri- 
canism, crank is an Americanism of remote British 
descent, and/^^ is a Briticism ; this last is perhaps 
the most needed word of the three, and from it 
we get a name for the faddist, the bore who 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

rides his hobby hard and without regard to the 
hounds. 

Just as in New York the "Upper Ten Thou- 
sand" of N. P. Willis have shrunk to the ''Four 
Hundred" of Mr. Ward McAllister, so in London 
the swells soon became the smart set, and after 
a while developed into swagger people, as they 
became more and more exclusive and felt the 
need of new terms to express their new quality. 
But in no department of speech is the consump- 
tion of words more rapid than in that describing 
the degrees of intoxication ; and the list of slang 
synonyms for the drunkard, and for his condi- 
tion, and for the act which brings it about, is as 
long as Leporello's. Among these, to get loaded 
and to carry a load are expressions obvious 
enough; and when we recall that jag is a pro- 
vincialism meaning a light load, we see easily 
that the man who has a jag on is in the earlier 
stages of intoxication. This use of the word is, 
I think, wholly American, and it has not crossed 
the Atlantic as yet, or else a British writer could 
never have blundered into a definition of jag as 
an umbrella, quoting in illustration a paragraph 
from a St. Louis paper which said that "Mr. 
Brown was seen on the street last Sunday in the 
rain carrying a large fine jag." One may won- 
der what this British writer would have made 
out of the remark of the Chicago humorist, that a 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

certain man was not always drunk, even if he did 
jump ' ' from jag to jag like an alcoholic chamois. " 

Here, of course, we are fairly within the boun- 
daries of slang — of the slang which is temporary 
only, and which withers away swiftly. But is 
swell slang now, and fad, and crank ? Is boom 
slang, and is bli^ard? And if it is difficult to 
draw any line of division between mere slang on 
the one side, and idiomatic words and phrases on 
the other, it is doubly difficult to draw this line 
between mere slang and the legitimate technicali- 
ties of a calling or a craft. Is it slang to say of a 
picture that the chief figure in it is out of drawing, 
or that the painter has got his values wrong ? 
And how could any historian explain the ins and 
outs of New York politics who could not state 
frankly that the machine made a slate, and that 
the mugwumps broke it. Such a historian must 
needs master the meaning of laying pipe for 
a nomination, or pulling wires to secure it, of 
taking the stump before election, and oi log-rolling 
after it; he must apprehend the exact relation of 
the boss to his henchmen and his heelers; and he 
must understand who the half-breeds were, and 
the stalwarts, and how the swallowtails were 
different from the short-hairs. 

To call one man a boss and another a henchman 
may have been slang once, but the words are 
lawful now, because they are necessary. It is 
203 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

only by these words that the exact relation of a 
certain kind of political leader to a certain kind 
of political follower can be expressed succinctly. 
There are, of course, not a few political phrases 
still under the ban because they are needless. 
Some of these may some day come to convey an 
exact shade of meaning not expressed by any 
other word, and when this shall happen, they 
will take their places in the legitimate vocabulary. 
I doubt whether this good fortune will ever befall 
a use of influence, now not uncommon in Wash- 
ington. The statesman at whose suggestion and 
request an office-holder has received his appoint- 
ment is known as that office-holder's influence. 
Thus a poor widow, suddenly turned out of a 
post she had held for years, because it was 
wanted by the henchman of some boss whose 
good will a senator or a department chief wished 
to retain, explained to a friend that her dismissal 
was due to the fact that her influence had died 
during the summer. The inevitable extension of 
the merit system in the civil service of our coun- 
try will probably prevent the permanent accept- 
ance of this new meaning. 

The political is only one of a vast number of 
technical vocabularies, all of which are proffering 
their words for popular consumption. Every art 
and every science, every trade and every calling, 
every sect and every sport, has its own special 
204 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

lexicon, the most of the words in which must 
always remain outside of the general speech 
of the whole people. They are reserves, to be 
drawn upon to fill up the regular army in time 
of need. Legitimate enough when confined to 
their proper use, those technicalities become 
slang when employed out of season, and when 
applied out of the special department of human 
endeavor in which they have been evolved. Of 
course, if the public interest in this department 
is increased for any reason, more and more words 
from that technical vocabulary are adopted into 
the wider dictionary of popular speech; and thus 
the general language is still enriching itself by 
the taking over of words and phrases from the 
terminology devised by experts for their own 
use. Not without interest would it be if we 
could ascertain exactly how much of the special 
vocabulary of the mere man of letters is now 
understandable by the plain people. It is one of 
the characters in * Middlemarch ' who maintains 
that ''correct English" is only ''the slang of 
prigs who write history and essays, and the 
strongest slang of all is the slang of poets." 

Of recent years many of the locutions of the 
Stock Exchange have won their way into general 
knowledge; and there are few of us who do not 
know what bears and bulls are, what a corner is, 
and what is a margin. The practical application 
205 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

of scientific knowledge makes the public at large 
familiar with many principles hitherto the exclu- 
sive possession of the experts, and the public at 
large gets to use freely to-day technicalities which 
even the learned of yesterday would not have 
understood. Current, for example, and insula- 
tion, made familiar by the startlingly rapid exten- 
sion of electrical possibilities in the last few years, 
have been so fully assimilated that they are now 
used independently and without avowed refer- 
ence to their original electrical meanings. 

The prevalence of a sport or of a game brings 
into general use the terms of that special amuse- 
ment. The Elizabethan dramatists, for example, 
use vy and revy and the other technicalities of the 
game of primero as freely as our western humorists 
use going it hlind and calling and the other tech- 
nicalities of the game of poker, which has been 
evolved out of primero in the course of the cen- 
turies. Some of the technicalities of euchre 
also, and of whist, have passed into every-day 
speech; and so have many of the terms of base- 
ball and of football, of racing and of trotting, 
of rowing and of yachting. These made their 
way into the vocabulary of the average man one 
by one, as the seasons went around and as the 
sports followed one another in popularity. So 
during the civil war many military phrases were 
frequent in the mouths of the people; and some 
206 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

of these established themselves firmly in the 
vocabulary. 

'* In language, as in life," so Professor Dowden 
tells us, "there is, so to speak, an aristocracy 
and a commonalty : words with a heritage of dig- 
nity, words which have been ennobled, and a 
rabble of words which are excluded from posi- 
tions of honor and trust." Some writers and 
speakers there are with so delicate a sense of 
refinement that they are at ease only with the 
ennobled words, with the words that came 
over with the conquerer, with the lords, spir- 
itual and temporal, of the vocabulary. Others 
there are, parvenus themselves, and so tainted 
with snobbery that they are happy only in the 
society of their betters; and these express the 
utmost contempt for the mass of the vulgar. 
Yet again others there are who have Lincoln's 
liking for the plain words of the plain people 
— the democrats of the dictionary, homely, 
simple, direct. These last are tolerant of the 
words, once of high estate, which have lost their 
rank and are fallen upon evil days, preferring 
them over the other words, plebeian once, but 
having pushed their fortunes energetically in 
successive generations, until now there are none 
more highly placed. 

Perhaps the aristocratic figure of speech is 
a little misleading, because in the English lan- 
207 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

guage, as in France after the Revolution, we find 
la carriere ouverte aux talents, and every word 
has a fair chance to attain the highest dignity in 
the gift of the dictionary. No doubt family con- 
nections are still potent, and it is much easier for 
some words to rise in life than it is for others. 
Most people would hold that war and law and 
medicine made a more honorable pedigree for a 
technical term than the stage, for example, or than 
some sport. 

And yet the stage has its own enormous vocab- 
ulary, used with the utmost scientific precision. 
The theater is a hotbed of temporary slang, often 
as lawless, as vigorous, and as picturesque as the 
phrases of the west; but it has also a terminology 
of its own, containing some hundreds of words, 
used always with absolute exactness. A mascot, 
meaning one who brings good luck, and a hoo- 
doo, meaning one who brings ill fortune, are terms 
invented in the theater, it is true; and many an- 
other odd word can be credited to the same 
source. But every one behind the scenes knows 
also what shy-borders are, and bunch-lights, 
and vampire-traps, and rahing-pieces — technical 
terms all of them, and all used with rigorous ex- 
actitude. Like the technicalities of any other 
profession, those of the stage are often very puz- 
zling to the uninitiated, and a greenhorn could 
hardly even make a guess at the meaning of 
208 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

terms which every visitor to a green-room might 
use at any moment. What layman could explain 
the office oi 2i cut-drop, the utility of a carpenter's 
scene, or the precise privileges of a bill-board 
ticket ? 

There is one word which the larger vocabulary 
of the public has lately taken from the smaller 
vocabulary of the playhouse, and v/hich some 
strolling player of the past apparently borrowed 
from some other vagabond familiar with thieves' 
slang. This word is fake. It has always con- 
veyed the suggestion of an intent to deceive. 
** Are you going to get up new scenery for the 
new play.?*" might be asked; and the answer 
would be, ''No; we shall fake it," meaning 
thereby that old scenery would be retouched and 
readjusted so as to have the appearance of new. 
From the stage the word passed to the news- 
papers, and a fake is a story invented, not 
founded on fact, "made out of whole cloth," 
as the stump-speakers say. Mr. Howells, always 
bold in using new words, accepts fake as good 
enough for him, and prints it in the ' Quality of 
Mercy ' without the stigma of italics or quotation- 
marks; just as in the same story he has adopted 
the colloquial electrics for electric lights —\.t., 
" He turned off the electrics." 

And hereafter the rest of us may use either fake 
or electrics with a clear conscience, either hiding 
209 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

ourselves behind Mr. Howells, who can always 
give a good account of himself when attacked, 
or else coming out into the open and asserting 
our own right to adopt either word because it 
is useful. "Is it called for ? Is it accordant with 
the analysis of the language.? Is it offered or 
backed by good authority ? These are the con- 
siderations by which general consent is won or 
repelled," so Professor Whitney tells us, "and 
general consent decides every case without ap- 
peal." It happens that Don Quixote preceded 
Professor Whitney in this exposition of the law, 
for when he was instructing Sancho Panza, then 
about to be appointed governor of an island, he 
used a Latinized form of a certain word which 
had become vulgar, explaining that "if some do 
not understand these terms it matters little, for 
custom will bring them into use in the course of 
time so that they will be readily understood. 
That is the way a language is enriched; custom 
and the public are all-powerful there." Some- 
times the needful word which is thought to be 
too common for use is Latinized, as Don Quixote 
preferred, but more often it is ennobled without 
change, being simply lifted out from among its 
former low companions. 

One of the hardest lessons for the amateurs in 
linguistics to learn — and most of them never 
attain to this wisdom — is that affectations are 

2IO 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

fleeting, that vulgarisms die of their own weak- 
ness, and that corruptions do little harm to the 
language. And the reason is not far to seek: 
either the apparent affectation, the alleged vul- 
garism, the so-called corruption, is accidental 
and useless, in which case its vogue will be 
brief and it will sink swiftly into oblivion; or 
else it represents a need and fills a want, in which 
case, no matter how careless it may be or how 
inaccurately formed, it will hold its own firmly, 
and there is really nothing more to be said about 
it. In other words, slang and all other variations 
from the high standard of the literary language 
are either temporary or permanent. If they are 
temporary only, the damage they can do is in- 
considerable. If they are permanent, their sur- 
vival is due solely to the fact that they were 
convenient or necessary. When a word or a 
phrase has come to stay (as reliable has, appa- 
rently), it is idle to denounce a decision rendered 
by the court of last resort. The most that we 
can do with advantage is to refrain from using the 
word ourselves, if we so prefer. 

It is possible to go further, even, and to turn 
the tables on those who see in slang an ever- 
growing evil. Not only is there little danger to 
the language to be feared from those alleged cor- 
ruptions, and from these doubtful locutions of 
evanescent popularity, but real harm is done by 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

the purists themselves, who do not understand 
every modification of our language, and who 
seek to check the development of idiom and to 
limit the liberty which enables our speech freely 
to provide for its own needs as these are revealed 
by time. It is these half-educated censors, 
prompt to protest against whatever is novel to 
them, and swift to set up the standard of a nar- 
row personal experience, who try to curb the 
development of a language. It cannot be de- 
clared too often and too emphatically how fortu- 
nate it is that the care of our language and the 
control of its development is not in the hands 
even of the most competent scholars. In lan- 
guage, as in politics, the people at large are in 
the long run better judges of their own needs 
than any specialist can be. As Professor Whitney 
says, "the language would soon be shorn of no 
small part of its strength if placed exclusively in 
the hands of any individual or of any class." In 
the hands of no class would it be enfeebled sooner 
than if it were given to the guardianship of the 
pedants and the pedagogs. 

A sloven in speech is as offensive as a sloven 
in manners or in dress; and neatness of phrase 
is as pleasant to the ear as neatness of attire to 
the eye. A man should choose his words at 
least as carefully as he chooses his clothes; a 
hint of the dandy even is unobjectionable, if it 



THE FUNCTION OF SLANG 

is but a hint. But when a man gives his whole 
mind to his dress, it is generally because he has 
but little mind to give ; and so when a man spends 
his force wholly in rejecting words and phrases, 
it is generally because he lacks ideas to express 
with the words and phrases of which he does 
approve. In most cases a man can say best 
what he has to say without lapsing into slang; 
but then a slangy expression which actually tells 
us something is better than the immaculate sen- 
tence empty of everything but the consciousness 
of its own propriety. 



213 



IX 

QUESTIONS OF USAGE 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

IF any proof were needed of the fact that an 
immense number of people take an intense 
interest in the right and wrong use of the English 
language, and also of the further fact that their 
interest is out of all proportion to their knowledge 
of the history of our speech, such proof could be 
found in the swift and unceasing eruption of 
"Jetters to the editor" which broke out in many 
of the American newspapers immediately after 
the publication of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's ' Reces- 
sional/ The exciting cause of this rash exhibi- 
tion was found in the line which told us that 

The shouting and the tumult dies. 

The gross blunder in this sentence leaped to the 
eyes of many whose acquaintance with the prin- 
ciples of English construction was confined to 
what they chanced to remember of the rules 
learned by heart in their grammar-school days. 
But there were others whose reading was a little 
wider, and who were able to cite precedents in 
217 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

Mr. Kipling's favor from Milton and from Shak- 
spere and from the King James translation of the 
Bible. Yet the argument from the past failed to 
convince some of the original protestants, one of 
whom suggested that the erring poet should be 
sent to a night-school, while another objected to 
any further discussion of the subject, since "a 
person who does n't know that the plural form 
of the verb is used when the subject of said verb 
is two or more nouns in the singular number 
should receive no mention in a reputable news- 
paper." It may be doubted whether the alter- 
cation was really bloody enough to demand 
attention from the disreputable newspapers, 
altho it was fierce and intolerant while it 
lasted. 

The battle raged for a fortnight, and the foun- 
dations of the deep were broken up. Yet it was 
really a tempest in a teapot, and oil for the 
troubled waters was ready at hand had any of 
those in danger of shipwreck thought to make 
use of it. In Professor Lounsbury's ' History of 
the English Language'— a book from which it is 
a constant pleasure to quote, since it combines 
sound scholarship, literary skill, and common 
sense in an uncommon degree— we are told that 
" rules have been and still are laid down . . . 
which never had any existence outside of the 
minds of grammarians and verbal critics. By 
218 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

these rules, so far as they are observed, freedom 
of expression is cramped, idiomatic peculiarity 
destroyed, and false tests for correctness set up, 
which give the ignorant opportunity to point out 
supposed error in others, while the real error lies 
in their own imperfect acquaintance with the best 
usage." 

And then Professor Lounsbury cites in illustra- 
tion the rule which was brought up against Mr. 
Kipling: ''There is a rule of Latin syntax that 
two or more substantives joined by a copulative 
require the verb to be in the plural. This has 
been foisted into the grammar of English, of 
which it is no more true than it is of modern 
German. . . . The grammar of English, as ex- 
hibited in the utterances of its best writers and 
speakers, has from the very earliest period al- 
lowed the widest discretion as to the use either 
of the singular or the plural in such cases. The 
importation and imposition of rules foreign to its 
idiom, like the one just mentioned, does more to 
hinder the free development of the tongue, and 
to dwarf its freedom of expression, than the 
widest prevalence of slovenliness of speech, or 
of affectation of style; for these latter are always 
temporary in their character, and are sure to be 
left behind by the advance in popular cultivation, 
or forgotten through the change in popular taste." 

This is really a declaration of independence for 
219 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

writers of English. It is the frank assertion that 
a language is made by those who use it— made 
by that very use. Language is not an invention 
of the grammarians and of the word-critics, 
whose business, indeed, is not to make language 
or to prescribe rules, but more modestly to record 
usage and to discover the principles which may 
underlie the incessant development of our com- 
mon speech. And here in discussing the syntax 
Professor Lounsbury is at one with Mn George 
Meredith discussing the vocabulary of our lan- 
guage, when the British novelist notes his own 
liking for " our blunt and racy vernacular, which 
a society nourished upon Norman English and 
English Latin banishes from print, largely to its 
impoverishment, some think." 

Those who have tried to impose a Latin syntax 
on the English language are as arbitrary as those 
who have insisted on an English pronunciation 
of the Latin language. Their attitude is as illogi- 
cal as it is dogmatic; and nowhere is dogmatism 
less welcome than in the attempt to come to a just 
conclusion in regard to English usage; and no- 
where is the personal equation more carefully to be 
allowed for. A term is not necessarily acceptable 
because we ourselves are accustomed to it, nor is 
it necessarily to be rejected because it reaches us 
as a novelty. The Americanism which a Brit- 
ish journalist glibly denounces may be but the 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

ephemeral catchword of a single street-gang, or 
it may have come over in the 'Mayflower' and 
be able to trace its ancestry back to a forefather 
that crossed with William the Conqueror. The 
Briticism which strikes some of us as uncouth 
and vulgar may be but a chance bit of cockney 
slang, or it may be warranted by the very genius 
of our language. 

Most of the little manuals which pretend to 
regulate our use of our own language and to 
declare what is and what is not good English are 
grotesque in their ignorance ; and the best of them 
are of small value, because they are prepared on 
the assumption that the English language is dead, 
like the Latin, and that, like Latin again, its usage 
is fixed finally. Of course this assumption is as 
far as possible from the fact. The English lan- 
guage is alive now— very much alive. And be- 
cause it is alive it is in a constant state of growth. 
It is developing daily according to its needs. It 
is casting aside words and usages that are no 
longer satisfactory; it is adding new terms as 
new things are brought forward ; and it is making 
new usages, as convenience suggests, short-cuts 
across lots, and to the neglect of the five-barred 
gates rigidly set up by our ancestors. It is throw- 
ing away as worn out words which were once 
very fashionable; and it is giving up grammatical 
forms which seem to be no longer useful. It is 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

continually trying to keep itself in the highest 
state of efficiency for work it has to do. It is 
ever urging ahead in the direction of increased 
utility; and if any of the so-called "rules" hap- 
pens to stand in the path of its progress— so 
much the worse for the rule! As Stephenson 
said, " It will be bad for the coo!" 

The English language is the tool of the peoples 
who speak English and who have made it to fit 
their hands. They have fashioned it to suit their 
own needs, and it is quite as characteristic as any- 
thing else these same peoples have made— quite 
as characteristic as the common law and as par- 
liamentary government. A language cannot but 
be a most important witness when we wish to 
inquire into the special peculiarities of a race. 
The French, for instance, are dominated by the 
social instinct, and they are prone to rely on logic 
a little too much, and their language is therefore 
a marvel of transparency and precision. In like 
manner v/e might deduce from an analysis of 
the German language an opinion as to the slow- 
ness of the individual Teuton, as to his occasional 
cloudiness, as to his willinsfness to take trouble, 
and as to his ultimate thoroughness. 

The peoples who speak English are very prac- 
tical and very direct; they are impatient of need- 
less detail; and they are intolerant of mere theory. 
These are some of the reasons why Enghsh is 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

less embarrassed with niceties of inflection than 
other languages, why it has cut its syntax to the 
bone, why it has got rid of most of its declen- 
sions and conjugations— why, in short, it has 
almost justified the critic who called it a gram- 
marless tongue. In every language there is a 
constant tendency toward uniformity and an un- 
ceasing effort to get rid of abnormal exceptions 
to the general rule; but in no language are these 
endeavors more effective than in English. In the 
past they have succeeded in simplifying the rules 
of our speech ; and they are at work now in the 
present on the same task of making English a 
more efficient instrument for those who use it. 

This effort of the language to do its duty as 
best it can is partly conscious and partly uncon- 
scious; and where the word-critic can be of 
service is in watching for the result of the un- 
conscious endeavor, so that it can be made plain, 
and so that it can be aided thereafter by conscious 
endeavor. The tendency toward uniformity is 
irresistible; and one of its results just now to be 
observed is an impending disappearance of the 
subjunctive mood. Those who may have sup- 
posed that the subjunctive was as firmly estab- 
lished in English as the indicative can discover 
easily enough by paying a little attention to their 
own daily speech and to the speech of their edu- 
cated neighbors that ''if I be not too late," for 
223 



aUESTIONS OF USAGE 

instance, is a form now rarely heard even in cul- 
tivated society. 

And the same tendency is to be observed also 
in the w^ritten language. Letters in the London 
Author in June and July, 1897, showed that in a 
few less than a million words chosen from the 
works of recent authors of good repute there 
were only 284 instances of the subjunctive mood, 
and that of these all but fifteen were in the verb 
" to be." This reveals to us that the value of this 
variation of form is no longer evident, not merely 
to careless speakers, but even to careful writers ; 
and it makes it probable tl^at it is only a question 
of time how soon the subjunctive shall be no 
longer differentiated from the indicative. Where 
our grandfathers would have taken pains to say 
"if I were to go away," and "if I be not misin- 
formed," our grandchildren will unhesitatingly 
write, "if I was to go away," and "if I am not 
misinformed." And so posterity will not need 
to clog its memory with any rule for the employ- 
ment of the subjunctive; and the English lan- 
guage will have cleansed itself of a barnacle. 

It is this same irresistible desire for the simplest 
form and for the shortest which is responsible for 
the increasing tendency to say "he don't" and 
" she don't," on the analogy of " we don't," " you 
don't," and "they don't," instead of the more 
obviously grammatical " he does n't " and " she 
224 



aUESTIONS OF USAGE 

does n't." A brave attempt has been made to 
maintain that '*he don't" is older than ''he does 
n't," and that it has at least the sanction of anti- 
quity. However this maybe, ''he don't" is certain 
to sustain itself in the future because it calls for less 
effort and because any willingness to satisfy the 
purist will seem less and less worth while as time 
goes on. It is well that the purist should fight 
for his own hand ; but it is well also to know 
that he is fighting a losing battle. 

The purist used to insist that we should not 
say "the house is being built,'' but rather "the 
house is building.'' So far as one can judge from 
a survey of recent writing the purist has aban- 
doned this combat; and nobody nowadays hesi- 
tates to ask, " What is being done }" The purist 
still objects to what he calls the Retained Object 
in such a sentence as " he was given a new suit 
of clothes." Here again the struggle is vain, for 
this usage is very old; it is well established in 
English ; and whatever may be urged against it 
theoretically, it has the final advantage of con- 
venience. The purist also tells us that we should 
say "come to see me" and "try to do it," and 
not "come and see me" and "try and do it." 
Here once more the purist is setting up a per- 
sonal standard without any warrant. He may 
use whichever of these forms he likes best, and 
we on our part have the same permission, with 
225 



QL'ESTIONS OF USAGE 

a strong preference for the older and more idio- 
matic of them. 

Theory is all very well, but to be of any value 
it must be founded on the solid rock of fact; and 
even when it is so established it has to yield to 
convenience. This is what the purist cannot be 
induced to understand. He seems to think that 
the language was made once for all, and that any 
deviation from the theory acted on in the past is 
intolerable in the present. He is often wholly at 
sea in regard to his theories and to his facts- 
more often than not; but no doubt as to his own 
infallibility ever discourages him. He just knows 
that he is right and that everybody else is wrong; 
and he has no sense of humor to save him from 
himself. And he makes up in violence what he 
lacks in wisdom. He accepts himself as a pro- 
phet verbally inspired, and he holds that this 
gives him the right to call down fire from heaven 
on all who do not accept his message. 

It was a purist of this sort who once WTote to 
a little literary weekly in New York, protesting 
against the use of people when persons would 
seem to be the better word, and complacently 
declaring that '"'for twenty-five years or more I 
have kept my eye on this little word people and 
I have yet to find a single American or English 
author who does not misuse it." We are in- 
stantly reminded of the Irish juryman who said, 
226 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

" Eleven more obstinate men I never met in the 
whole course of my life." In this pitiful condi- 
tion of affairs one cannot discover on what this 
purist bases the hope he expresses that " in the 
course of two or three hundred years the correct 
employment of it may possibly become general." 
Rather may it be hoped that in the course of two 
or three hundred years a knowledge of the prin- 
ciples which govern English usage may become 
general. 

What is called the Split Infinitive is also a cause 
of pain to the purist, who is greatly grieved when 
he finds George Lewes in the * Life of Goethe ' 
saying " to completely understand. " This insert- 
ing of an adverb between the to and the rest 
of the verb strikes the word-critic as pernicious, 
and he denounces it instantly as a novelty to be 
stamped out before it permanently contaminates 
our speech. Even Professor A. S. Hill, in his 
'Foundations of Rhetoric,' while admitting its 
antiquity, since it has been in use constantly 
from the days of Wyclif to the days of Herbert 
Spencer, still declares it to be " a common fault " 
not sanctioned or even condoned by good 
authority. 

The fact is, I think, that the Split Infinitive has 

a most respectable pedigree, and that it is rather 

the protest against it which is the novelty now 

establishing itself. The Split Infinitive is to be 

227 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

found in the pages of Shakspere, Massinger, Sir 
Thomas Browne, Defoe, Burke, Coleridge, Byron, 
De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Brown- 
ing, Motley, Lowell, and Holmes. But it is a fact 
also, I think, that since the protest has been raised 
there has been a tendency among careful writers 
to eschew the Split Infinitive, or at least to em- 
ploy it only when there is a gain in lucidity from 
its use, as there is, for example, in Professor 
Lounsbury's " to more than counterbalance " 
('Studies in Chaucer,' i. 447). 

A writer who has worked out for himself a 
theory of style, and who has made up his mind 
as to the principles he ought to follow in writing, 
often yields to protests the validity of which he 
refuses to admit. He gives the protestant the 
benefit of the doubt and drops the stigmatized 
words from his vocabulary and refrains from the 
stigmatized usages, reserving always the right to 
avail himself of them at a pinch. What such a 
writer has for his supreme object is to convey his 
thought into the minds of his readers with the 
least friction; and he tries therefore to avoid all 
awkwardness of phrase, all incongruous words, 
all locutions likely to arouse resistance, since any 
one of these things will inevitably lessen the 
amount of attention which this reader or that will 
then have available for the reception of the writer's 
message. This is what Herbert Spencer has called 
228 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

the principle of Economy of Attention ; and a firm 
grasp of this principle is a condition precedent to 
a clear understanding of literary art. 

For a good and sufficient reason such a writer 
stands ready at any time to break this self-im- 
posed rule. If a solecism, or a vulgarism even, 
will serve his purpose better at a given moment 
than the more elegant word, he avails himself of 
it, knowing what he is doing, and risking the 
smaller loss for the greater gain. M. Legouve 
tells us that at a rehearsal of a play of Scribe's 
he drew the author's attention to a bit of bad 
French at the climax of one of the acts, and 
Scribe gratefully accepted the correct form which 
was suggested. But two or three rehearsals later 
Scribe went back unhesitatingly to the earlier and 
incorrect phrase, which happened to be swifter, 
more direct, and dramatically more expressive 
than the academically accurate sentence M. Le- 
gouve had supplied. Shakspere seems often to 
have been moved by like motives, and to have 
been willing at any time to sacrifice strict gram- 
mar to stage-effectiveness. 

Two tendencies exist side by side to-day, and 
are working together for the improvement of our 
language. One is the tendency to disregard all 
useless distinctions and to abolish all useless ex- 
ceptions and to achieve simplicity and regularity. 
The other is the tendency toward a more delicate 
229 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

precision which shall help the writer to present 
his thought with the utmost clearness. 

Of the first of these abundant examples can be 
cited phrases which the word-critic would de- 
nounce, and which are not easy to defend on any 
narrow ground, but which are employed freely 
even by conscientious writers, well aware that no 
utility is served by a pedantic precision. So we 
fmd Matthew Arnold in his lectures * On Trans- 
lating Homer ' speaking of ** the four Jirst," where 
the purist would prefer to have said "the Jirst 
four." So we fmd Hawthorne in the ' Blithedale 
Romance' writing "fellow, clown, or bumpkin, 
to either of these," when the purist would have 
wished him to say '' to any one of these," holding 
that " either" can be applied only when there are 
but two objects. 

In like manner the word-critics object to the 
use of the superlative degree when the compara- 
tive is all that is needed; yet we fmd in the King 
James translation of Genesis, " her eldest son, 
Esau," and she had but two sons. And they 
refuse to allow either a comparative or a superla- 
tive to adjectives which indicate completeness; 
yet we fmd in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' "its 
success was not more universal." They do not 
like to see a writer say that anything is " more 
perfect" or " most complete," holding that what 
is universal or perfect or complete "does not 
230 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

admit of augmentation," as one of them declared 
more tlian a century ago in the Gentleman' s Mag- 
azine for July, 1797. In all these cases logic may 
be on the side of the word-critic. But what of 
it ? Obedience to logic would here serve no use- 
ful purpose, and therefore logic is boldly dis- 
obeyed. However inexact these phrases may be, 
they mislead no one and they can be understood 
without hesitation. 

Side by side with this tendency to take the 
short-cut exists the other tendency to go the long 
way round if by so doing the writer's purpose is 
more easily accomplished. There is a common 
usage which is frequently objurgated by the 
word-critics and which may fall into desuetude, 
not through their attacks, but because of its con- 
flict with this second tendency. This is the in- 
sertion of an unnecessary who or which after an 
and or a but, as in this sentence from Professor 
Butcher's admirable discussion of Aristotle's 
* Theory of Poetry ' : " Nature is an artist capable 
indeed of mistakes, but who by slow advances 
and through many failures realizes her own 
idea." So in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' we 
are told of "a chorus of twenty-seven youths 
and as many virgins, of noble family, and whose 
parents were both alive." This locution is pro- 
per in French, but it is denounced as improper 
in English by the purists, who would strike out 
231 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

the hut from Professor Butcher's and the and 
from Gibbon's. 

It is a constant source of amusement to those 
interested in observing the condition and the 
development of the language to note the fre- 
quency with which the phrases put under taboo 
by the word-critics occur in the writings of the 
masters of English. In my own recent reading I 
have found this despised construction in the pages 
of Fielding, Johnson, Thackeray, Matthew Ar- 
nold, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. John Morley, 
Mr. Henry James, and Professor Jebb in Great 
Britain, and in pages of Hawthorne, Lowell, 
Holmes, and Mr. John Fiske in the United States. 
What is more significant perhaps is its discovery 
in the works of professed students of language 
—Trench, Isaac Taylor, Max Muller, and W. D. 
Whitney. 

And yet, in spite of this array of authorities, I 
am inclined to believe that this usage may per- 
haps disappear with the increasing attention 
which the best writers are now giving to the 
rhythm and balance of their sentences. It is not 
that the form is wrong— that is a matter not to 
be decided offhand; it is that the form is awk- 
ward and that it jars on the feeling for symmetry 
—the feeling which leads us to put a candlestick 
on each side of the clock on the mantelpiece. 
Professor Whitney began one of his sentences 
232 



aUESTIONS OF USAGE 

thus: "Castren, himself a Finn, and whose long 
and devoted labors have taught us more respect- 
ing them than has been brought to light by any 
other man, ventures," etc. Would not this sen- 
tence have been easier and more elegant if Whit- 
ney had either struck out and (which is not 
needed at all) or else inserted who was after 
Castren ? In the sentence as Whitney wrote it 
and whose makes me look back for the who which 
my feeling for symmetry leads me to suppose 
must have preceded it somewhere, and in this 
vain search part of my attention is abstracted. I 
have been forced to think of the manner of his 
remarks when my mind ought to have given itself 
so far as might be to the matter of them. In 
other words, the real objection to this usage is 
that it is in violation of the principle of Economy 
of Attention. 

Another usage also under fire from the purists 
is exemplified in another extract from Whitney: 
" It is, I am convinced, a mistake to commence 
at once upon a course of detailed comparative 
philology with pupils who have only enjoyed the 
ordinary training in the classical or modern lan- 
guages." Obviously his meaning would be more 
sharply defined if he had put only after instead of 
before enjoyed. So Froude, writing about * Eng- 
lish Seamen in the Sixteenth Century,' says that 
" the fore-and-aft rig alone would enable a vessel 
233 



aUESTIONS OF USAGE 

to tack, as it is called, and this could only be used 
with craft of moderate tonnage " ; and here again 
a transposition after the verb would increase the 
exactness of the statement. 

The proposition of only is really important only 
when the misplacing of it may cause ambiguity; 
and Professor F. N. Scott has shown how Web- 
ster, always careful in the niceties of style, un- 
hesitatingly put only out of its proper place, if by 
so doing he could improve the rhythm of his 
period, as in this sentence from the second 
Bunker Hill oration: "It did not, indeed, put an 
end to the war; but, in the then existing hostile 
state of feeling, the difficulties could only be re- 
ferred to the arbitration of the sword." This is 
as it should be, the small effect promptly sacri- 
ficed for the larger. The rule— if rule it really is 
—must be broken unhesitatingly when there is 
greater gain than loss. 

There is an anecdote in some volume of French 
theatrical memoirs narrating an experience of 
Mademoiselle Clairon, the great tragic actress, 
with a pupil of hers, a girl of fine natural gifts 
for the histrionic art, but far too frequent and 
too exuberant in her gesticulation. So when the 
pupil was once to appear before the public in a 
recitation. Mademoiselle Clairon bound the girl's 
arms to her side by a stiff thread and sent her 
thus upon the stage. With the first strong feel- 
234 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

ing she had to express the pupil tried to raise her 
arms, only to be restrained by the thread. A 
dozen times in the course of her recitation she 
was prevented from making the gestures she de- 
sired, until at the very end she could stand it no 
longer, and in the climax of her emotion she 
broke her bonds and lifted her hands to her head. 
When she came off the stage she went humbly 
to where Mademoiselle Clairon was standing in 
the wings and apologized for having snapped the 
thread. *' But you did quite right!" said the 
teacher. ** That was the time to make the ges- 
ture—not before!" 

Rules exist to aid in composition; and by wise 
men composition is not undertaken merely to 
prove the existence of the rules. Circumstances 
may alter even codes of manners; in Paris, for 
instance, it is permissible to sop bread in the 
sauce, a practice which is bad form in London— 
since nobody would want any more of a British 
sauce than could be avoided. This paper, how- 
ever, has failed of its purpose if it is taken as a 
plea for license. Rather is it intended as an argu- 
ment for liberty. It has been written as the re- 
sult of a belief that a frank protest is needed now 
and again against the excessive demands of the 
linguistic dogmatists. That what the linguis- 
tic dogmatists write is as widely read as it seems 
to be is a sign of a healthy interest in the speech 
235 



aUESTIONS OF USAGE 

which must serve us all, scholars and school- 
masters and plain people. This interest should 
be aroused also to shake off the shackles with 
which pedagogs and pedants seek to restrain not 
only the full growth of our noble tongue, but 
even its free use. As Renan pithily put it, every 
time that " grammarians have tried deliberately to 
reform a language, they have succeeded only in 
making it heavy, without expression, and often 
less logical than the humblest dialect." 

If English is to be kept fit to do the mighty 
work it bids fair to be called upon to accomplish 
in the future, it must be allowed to develop along 
the line of least resistance. It must be encouraged 
to follow its own bent and to supply its own 
needs and to shed its worn-out members. It 
must not be hampered by syntax taken from 
Latin or by rules evolved out of the inner con- 
sciousness of word-critics. It must not be too 
squeamish or even too particular, since excessive 
refinement goes only with muscular weakness. 
It must be allowed to venture on solecisms, on 
neologisms, on Americanisms, on Briticisms, on 
Australianisms, if need be, however ugly some 
of these may seem, for the language uses itself up 
fast, and has to be replenished that it shall not 
lose its vigor and its ardor. 

To say this is not to say that every one of us 
who uses English in speaking or in writing should 
236 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

not always choose his words carefully and decide 
on his forms judiciously. Only by a wise selec- 
tion can the language be kept at its highest effi- 
ciency; only thus can its full powers be revealed 
to us. And if we decide that we prefer to keep 
to the very letter of the law as laid down by the 
grammarians— why, that is our privilege and no 
one shall say us nay. But let us not think scorn 
of those who are careless in paying their tithes 
of mint and anise and cummin, if also they stand 
upright and speak the truth plainly. 

For myself— if a personal confession is not 
here out of place— I shrink always from profiting 
by any license I have just claimed for others; I 
strive always to eschew the Split Infinitive, to 
avoid and who when there is no preceding who 
which may balance it, and to put 07ily always in 
the place where it will do most good. It is ever 
my aim to avail myself of the phrase which will 
convey my meaning into the reader's mind with 
the least friction ; and out of the effort to achieve 
this approach along the line of least resistance, I 
get something of the joy an honest craftsman 
ought always to feel in the handling of his tools. 
For this is what words are, after all; they are the 
tools of man, devised to serve his daily needs. 
As Bagehot once suggested, we may not know 
how language was first invented and made, " but 
beyond doubt it was shaped and fashioned into 
237 



QUESTIONS OF USAGE 

its present state by common, ordinary men and 
women using it for common and ordinary pur- 
poses. They wanted a carving-knife, not a razor 
or lancet; and those great artists who have to 
use language for more exquisite purposes, who 
employ it to describe changing sentiments and 
momentary fancies and the fluctuating and in- 
definite inner world, must use curious nicety and 
hidden but effectual artifice, else they cannot 
duly punctuate their thoughts and slice the fine 
edges of their reflections. A hair's breadth is as 
important to them as a yard's breadth to a com- 
mon workman." 
(1898) 



238 



X 

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

I HAVE a theory about double rimes for which 
I shall be attacked by the critics, but which 
I could justify perhaps on high authority, or, at 
least, analogy," wrote Mrs. Browning to a friend 
not long after the publication of one of her books. 
" These volumes of mine have more double rimes 
than any two books of English poems that ever 
to my knowledge were printed; I mean of Eng- 
lish poems not comic. Now of double rimes in 
use which are perfect rimes you are aware how 
few there are; and yet you are also aware of what 
an admirable effect in making a rhythm various 
and vigorous double riming is in English poetry. 
Therefore I have used a certain license; and after 
much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers 
have ventured it with the public. And do you 
tell me— you who object to the use of a different 
vowel in a double rime— why you rime (as every- 
body does, without blame from everybody) given 
to heaven, when you object to my riming remem- 
ber to chamber ? The analogy is all on my side, 
241 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

and I believe that the spirit of the English lan- 
guage is also." 

Here Mrs. Browning raises a question of in- 
terest to all who have paid any attention to the 
technic of verse. No doubt double rimes do 
give vigor and variety to a poem, altho no 
modern English lyrist has really rivaled the mag- 
nificent medieval ' Dies Irae,' wherein the double 
rimes thrice repeated fall one after the other like 
the beating of mighty trip-hammers. There is 
no doubt also that the English language is not so 
fertile in double rimes as the Latin, the German, 
or the Italian ; and that some of the English poets, 
clutching for these various and vigorous effects, 
have refused to abide by the strict letter of the 
law, and have claimed the license of modifying 
the emphatic vowel from one line to another. 
Mrs. Browning defends this revolt, and finds it 
easy to retort to her correspondent that he him- 
self has ventured to link heaven and given. Many 
another poet has coupled these unwilling words; 
and not a few have also married river and ever, 
meadow and shadow, spirit and inherit. 

Mrs. Browning is prepared to justify herself by 
authority, or at least by analogy ; and yet, in bring- 
ing about the espousal of chamber and remember, 
she is evidently aware that it is no love-match 
she is aiding and abetting, but at best a marriage 
of.convenience She pleads precedence to excuse 
242 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

her infraction of a statute the general validity of 
which she apparently admits. The most that she 
claims is that the tying together of chamber and 
remember is permissible. She seems to say that 
these ill-mated pairs are, of course, not the best 
possible rimes, but that, since double rimes are 
scarce in English, the lyrist may, now and then, 
avail himself of the second best. An American 
poet of my acquaintance is bolder than the British 
poetess ; he has the full courage of his convic- 
tions. He assures me that he takes pleasure in 
the tying together of incompatible words like 
river and ever, meadow and shadow, finding in 
these arbitrary matings a capricious and agreeable 
relief from the monotony of more regular riming. 

This forces us to consider the basis upon which 
any theory of *' allowable " rimes must rest— any 
theory, that is, which, after admitting that certain 
rimes are exact and absolutely adequate, asserts 
also that certain other combinations of terminal 
words, altho they do not rime completely and 
to the satisfaction of all, are still tolerable. This 
theory accepts certain rimes as good, and it claims 
in addition certain others as "good enough." 

Any objection to the pairing of spirit and in- 
herit, of remember and chamber, and the like, 
cannot be founded upon the fact that in the ac- 
cepted orthography of the English language the 
spelling of the terminations differs. Rime has to 
243 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

do with pronunciation and not with orthography; 
rime is a match between sounds. The symbols 
that represent these sounds— or that may misre- 
present them more or less violently— are of little 
consequence. What is absurdly called a " rime 
to the eye " is a flagrant impossibility, or else hic- 
cough may pair off with enough, clean with ocean, 
and plague with ague. The eye is not the judge of 
sound, any more than the nose is the judge of 
color. Height is not a rime to eight ; but it is a 
rime to sight, to bite, to proselyte, and to indict. 
So one does not rime with t\\\\QX gone or tone ; 
but it does with son and with bun. Tomb and 
comb, and rhomb and bomb are not rimes; but 
tomb and doom, and spume and rheum are. The 
objection to the linking together of meadow and 
shadow, and of ever and river is far deeper than 
any superficial difference of spelling; it is rooted 
in the difference of the sounds themselves. In 
spite of the invention of printing, or even of 
writing itself, the final appeal of poetry is still to 
the ear and not to the eye. 

Probably the first utterances of man were 
rhythmic, and probably poetry had advanced far 
toward perfection long before the alphabet was 
devised as an occasional substitute for speech. 
In the beginning the poet had to charm the ears 
of those whom he sought to move, since there 
was then no way by which he could reach the 
244 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

eye also. To the rhapsodists verse was an oral 
art solely, as it is always for the dramatists, 
whose speeches must fall trippingly from the 
tongue, or fail of their effect. The work of the 
lyrist— writer of odes, minnesinger, troubadour, 
ballad-minstrel— has always been intended to be 
said or sung; that it should be read is an after- 
thought only. Even to-day, when the printing- 
press has us all under its wheels, it is by our 
tongues that we possess ourselves of the poetry 
we truly relish. A poem is not really ours till 
we know it by heart and can say it to ourselves, 
or at least until we have read it aloud, and until 
we can quote it freely. If a poem has actually 
taken hold on our souls, it rings in our ears, even 
if we happen to be visualizers also, and can call 
up at will the printed page whereon it is pre- 
served. 

This fact, that poetry is primarily meant to be 
spoken aloud rather than read silently, altho 
obvious when plainly stated, has not been firmly 
grasped by many of those who have considered 
the technic of the art, and therefore there is often 
obscurity in the current discussions of rime and 
rhythm. In the rhetoric of verse there is to-day 
not a little of the confusion which existed in the 
rhetoric of prose before Herbert Spencer put forth 
his illuminating and stimulating essay on the 
'Philosophy of Style.' Even in that paper he 
245 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

suggested that the principle of Economy of At- 
tention was as applicable to verse as to prose; 
and he remarked that '' were there space, it might 
be worth while to inquire whether the pleasure 
we take in rime, and also that which we take in 
euphony, are not partly ascribable to the same 
general cause." 

This principle of Economy of Attention ex- 
plains why it is that any style of speaking or 
writing is more effective than another, by remind- 
ing us that we have, at any given moment, only 
so much power of attention, and that, there- 
fore, however much of this power has to be 
employed on the form of any message must be 
subtracted from the total power, leaving just so 
much less attention available for the apprehen- 
sion of the message itself. To convey a thought 
from one mind to another, we must use words 
the reception of which demands more or less 
mental exertion ; and therefore that statement is 
best which carries the thought with the least 
verbal friction. Some friction there must be 
always; but the less there is, the more power of 
attention the recipient has left to master the trans- 
mitted thought. 

It is greatly to be regretted that Spencer did 
not spare the space to apply to verse this prin- 
ciple, which has been so helpful in the analysis 
of prose. He did go so far as to suggest that 
246 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

metrical language is more effective than prose, 
because when " we habitually preadjust our per- 
ceptions to the measured movement of verse " it 
is " probable that by so doing we economize 
attention." This suggestion has been elaborated 
by one of his disciples, the late Mr. Grant Allen, in 
his treatise on ' Physiological Esthetics,' and it has 
been formally controverted by the late Mr. Gur- 
ney, in his essay on the 'Power of Sound.' 
Perhaps both Spencer and Gurney are right; part 
of our pleasure in rhythm is due to the fact that 
" the mind may economize its energies by antici- 
pating the attention required for each syllable," 
as the former says, and part of it is " of an en- 
tirely positive kind, acting directly on the sense," 
as the latter maintains. 

Whether or not Spencer's principle of Economy 
of Attention adequately explains our delight in 
rhythm, there is no doubt that it can easily be 
utilized to construct a theory of rime. Indeed, 
it is the one principle which provides a satisfac- 
tory solution to the problem propounded by Mrs. 
Browning. No one can deny that more or less 
of our enjoyment of rimed verse is due to the 
skill with which the poet satisfies with the second 
rime the expectation he has aroused with the 
first. When he ends a line with gray, or grow, 
or grand, we do not know which of the two- 
score or more of possible rimes to each of these 
247 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

the lyrist will select, and we await his choice 
with happy anticipation. If he should balk us of 
our pleasure, if he should omit the rime we had 
confidently counted upon, we are rudely awak- 
ened from our dream of delight, and we ask our- 
selves abruptly what has happened. It is as 
tho the train of thought had run off the track. 
Spencer notes how we are put out by halting 
versification; " much as at the bottom of a flight 
of stairs a step more or less than we counted 
upon gives us a shock, so too does a misplaced 
accent or a supernumerary syllable." 

So, too, does an inaccurate or an arbitrary rime 
give us a shock. If verse is something to be said 
or sung, if its appeal is to the ear primarily, if 
rime is a terminal identity of sound, then any 
theory of " allowable " rimes is impossible, since 
an '* allowable " rime is necessarily inexact, and 
thus may tend to withdraw attention from the 
matter of the poem to its manner. No doubt 
there are readers who do not notice the incom- 
patibility of these matings, and there are others 
who notice yet do not care. But the more accu- 
rately trained the ear is, the more likely these 
alliances are to annoy ; and the less exact the rime, 
the more likely the ear is to discover the discre- 
pancy. The only safety for the rimester who 
wishes to be void of all offense is to risk no 
union of sounds against whose marriage anybody 
248 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

knows any just cause of impediment. Perhaps 
a wedding within the prohibited degrees may be 
allowed to pass without protest now and again ; 
but sooner or later somebody will surely forbid 
the banns. 

Just as a misplaced accent or a supernumerary 
syllable gives us a shock, so does the attempt of 
Mrs. Browning to pair off remember and chamber ; 
so may also the attempt of Poe to link together 
valleys and palace. The lapse from the perfect 
ideal may be but a trifle, but a lapse it is never- 
theless. A certain percentage of our available 
attention may thus be wasted, and worse than 
wasted; it may be called away from the poem 
itself, and absorbed suddenly by the mere versi- 
fication. For a brief moment we may be forced 
to consider a defect of form, when we ought to 
have our minds absolutely free to receive the 
poet's meaning. Whenever a poet cheats us of 
our expectancy of perfect rime, he forces us to 
pay exorbitant freight charges on the gift he has 
presented to us. 

It is to be noted, however, that as rime is a 
matching of sounds, certain pairs of words whose 
union is not beyond reproach can hardly be re- 
jected without pedantry, since the ordinary pro- 
nunciation of cultivated men takes no account of 
the slight differences of sound audible if the 
words are'uttered with absolute precision. Thus 
249 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

Tennyson in the 'Revenge' rimes Devon and 
Heaven ; and thus Lowell in the ' Fable for Cri- 
tics ' rimes irresistible and untwistable. In ' Elsie 
Venner' Dr. Holmes held up to derision **the 
inevitable rime of cockney and Yankee beginners, 
morn and dawn " ; but, at the risk of revealing 
myself as a Yankee of New York, I must confess 
that any pronunciation of this pair of words 
seems to me stilted that does not make them 
quite impeccable as a rime. 

We are warned, however, to be on our guard 
against pushing any principle to an absurd ex- 
treme. If certain pairs of words have been sent 
forth into the world by English poets from a time 
whereof the memory of man runneth not to the 
contrary, then perhaps they may now plead pre- 
scription whenever any cold-hearted commen- 
tator is disposed to doubt the legitimacy of their 
conjunction. Altho the union is forbidden by 
the strict letter of the law,— like marriage with a 
deceased wife's sister in England, — only the cen- 
sorious are disposed to take the matter into court 
In time certain rimes— falsely so called— "are 
legitimated by custom," one British critic has 
declared, citing love ^nd prove, for example, and 
asserting that ''river has just got to rime with 
ever or the game cannot be played." You must 
have forgiven or you will never get to heaven. 
"We expect these licenses and do not resent 
250 



AN maUIRY AS TO RIME 

them, as we do resent Poe's valleys and palace 
and the eccentricities of Mrs. Browning." That 
there is force in this contention cannot be denied; 
but it must be remembered that those who urge 
it are necessarily lovers of poetry, or at least fairly 
familiar with a large body of English verse, or 
else they would not be aware of the fact that love 
Sind prove, heaven and given, have often been tied 
together. But even if these critics, who have 
been sophisticated by over-familiarity with poetic 
license, do not resent this pairing of unequal 
sounds, it does not follow that those who for the 
first time hear dove linked with Jove are equally 
forgiving or negligent. Even if these licenses 
are pardoned by some as venial offenses, there 
are others whose ears are annoyed by them and 
whose attention is distracted. In other words, 
we are here face to face with the personal equa- 
tion ; and the only way for a writer of verse to 
be certain that one or another of his rimes will 
not be resented by this reader or that is to make 
sure that all his marriages are flawless. 

Thus and thus only can he avoid offense with 
absolute certainty. If his rimes are perfect to the 
ear when read aloud or recited, then they will 
never divert the attention of the auditor from the 
matter of the poem to the mere manner. On the 
other hand, it is only fair to confess that there 
are some lovers of poetry who find a charm in 
251 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

lawlessness and in eccentricity. A series of per- 
fect rimes pleases them; but so also does an 
occasional rime in which the vowel is slightly 
varied. And the poet's consolation for the loss 
of these must lie in the knowledge that he can- 
not hope to satisfy everybody. Consolation may 
lie also in the belief that any lapse from the per- 
fect rime is dangerous, for even if there are some 
who enjoy the divergence when it is delicate,— 
that is, when the vowel sound, even if not abso- 
lutely identical, is sympathetically akin,— there 
are very few who are not annoyed when the 
difference becomes as obvious as in the attempt 
to link together dial and hall or water and clear. 
And as it is only a sophisticated ear which en- 
joys the mating of valleys with palace, for ex- 
ample, so the attempted rime of this type is to 
be found chiefly in the more labored poets— in 
those who are consciously literary. The primi- 
tive lyrist, the unconscious singer who makes a 
ballad of a May morning or rimes a jingle for the 
nursery or puts together a couplet to give point 
to a fragment of proverbial wisdom, is nearly 
always exact in the repetition of his vowel. 
Where he is careless is in the accompanying 
consonants. As is remarked by the British critic 
from whom quotation has already been made, 
" we may observe that in all early European 
poetry, from the ' Song of Roland ' to the popular 
252 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

ballads, the ear was satisfied with assonance, that 
is, the harmony of the vowel sounds; hat'xs as- 
sonant to tag, and that was good enough." So 
in the proverbial couplet, 

See a pin and pick it up, 

All day long you '11 have good luck. 

So again more than once in the unaffected lyrics 
of the laureate of the nursery, Mother Goose: 

Goosy, goosy gander, 

Where do you wander? 
Upstairs and downstairs, 

And in my lady's chamber. 

Leave them alone 

And they vv'ill come home. 

This assonance is visible in the linking of wild 
wood and childhood, which many versifiers have 
proffered as tho it was a double rime; it is to 
be seen again in Whittier's main land and train- 
band ; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte's * Her 
Letter ' : 

Of that ride— that to me was the rarest; 

Of— the something you said at the gate. 
Ah! Joe, then I was n't an heiress 

To the best-paying lead in the State. 

Altho this substitution of assonance for rime 
is uncommon in the more literary lyrics, which 

253 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

we may suppose to have been composed with 
the pen, it is still frequently to be found in the 
popular song, born on the lips of the singer, and 
set down in black and white only as an after- 
thought. It abounds in the college songs which 
have been sung into being, and in the brisk bal- 
lads of the variety-show— which Planche neatly 
characterized as '' most music-hall, most melan- 
choly." In one dime song-book containing the 
words set to music by Mr. David Braham to en- 
liven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan's amusing 
pictures of life among the lowly in the tenement- 
house districts of New York, there can be dis- 
covered at least a dozen instances of this use of 
assonance as tho it were rime: 

De gal's name is Nannie, 

And she 's just left her mammie. 

He can get a pair of crutches 
From the doctor, it 's well known, 

And feel like the King of Persia, 
When he goes marching home. 

One husband was a toper, 
The other was a loafer. 

'T is there the solid voters 
Wear Piccadilly chokers. 

On Sundays, then, the ladies 

With a hundred million babies. 

254 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

To the poor of suffering Ireland: 

Time and time again ; 
We thank you for our countrymen, 

And Donavan is our name. 

When these lines are sung, rough as they are, 
the ear is satisfied by the absolute identity of the 
final vowel, upon which the voice lingers— while 
the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed. 
It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of 
those who heard these songs ever discovered any 
deficiency in the rimes. In more literary ballads 
only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard ; 
but in folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance 
seems to be legal tender by tacit convention. 
When Benedick was trying to make a copy of 
verses for Beatrice, he declared that he could 
**find out no rime to lady but baby, an inno- 
cent rime "—a remark which shows us that Bene- 
dick's theory of riming was much the same as 
Mr. Harrigan's. 

Probably, however, the attempt to substitute 
assonance for rime would be resented by many 
of the readers who are tolerant toward such de- 
partures from exactness as heaven and shriven or 
grove and dove. That is to say, the unliterary ear 
insists on the identity of the vowel while careless 
as to the consonant, and the literary ear insists on 
the identity of the consonant while not quite so 
careful as to the vowel. And here is another 

255 



AN maUIRY AS TO RIME 

reason for exact accuracy, which satisfies alike 
the learned and the unlearned, and is also in 
accord with Herbert Spencer's principle. It is 
true, probably, that such minor divergencies as 
the mating of ho7ne and alone and of shadow and 
meadow— to take one of each class— are not gene- 
rally conscious on the part of the poet himself. 
Nor are they generally noticed by the reader or 
the auditor; and even when noticed they are not 
always resented as offensive. But just so long 
as there is a chance that they may be noticed and 
that they may be resented, they had best be 
avoided. The poet avails himself of his license 
at his peril. That way danger lies. 

It is in the ' Adventures of Philip ' that Thacke- 
ray records his hero's disapproval of a poet who 
makes fire rime with Marire. Even if the rime 
is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convict- 
ing the lyrist of carelessness of speech— not to 
call it vulgarity of pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes 
himself, sharp as he was upon those who rimed 
dawn and morn, was none the less guilty of a 
peccadillo quite as reprehensible— H/;^^^ and ad- 
vertisers. Whittier ventured to chain Eva not 
only with leave her and receive her, which sug- 
gest a slovenly utterance, but also with give her, 
river, and never, which are all of them wrenched 
from their true sounds to force them unto a vain 
and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred 
256 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

cockney recklessness can be found in one of 
Mrs. Browning's misguided modernizations of 
Chaucer: 

Now grant my ship some smooth haven win her ; 
I follow Statins first, and then Corinna. 

In each of these cases the poet takes out a wed- 
ding license for his couplet, only at the cost of 
compelling the reader to miscall the names of 
these ladies, and to address them as Marire, 
Eli:{er, Ever, and Cor inner ; and tho the rimes 
themselves are thus placed beyond reproach, the 
poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and 
precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of 
pronunciation is as disenchanting as any vulgarity 
in grammar. 

Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that 
makes these rimes are certain of Mr. Kipling's, 
as to which we are a little in doubt whether he 
is making his rime by violence to the normal 
sound or whether his own pronunciation is so 
abnormal that the rime itself seems to him accu- 
rate: 

Railways and roads they wrought 
For the needs of the soil within; 

A time to scribble in court. 
A time to bear and grin. 

Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished 

quarters, 
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's 

daughters, 

257 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

I quarrel with my wife at home. 

We never fight abroad; 
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact, 

I am her only lord. 

Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness, 
and yet akin to it, is the trick of forcing an em- 
phasis upon a final syllable which is naturally 
short, in order that it may be made to rime with 
a syllable which is naturally long. For example, 
in the exquisite lyric of Lovelace's, 'To Althea 
from Prison,' in the second quatrain of the second 
stanza we find that we must prolong the final 
syllable of the final word: 

When thirsty grief in wine we steep, 
When healths and draughts go free, 

Fishes that tipple in the deep 
Know no such liber//. 

Here the rime evades us unless we read the 
last word libertee. But what then are we to do 
with the same word in the second quatrain of the 
first stanza ? To get his rime here, the poet in- 
sists on our reading the last word libertie : 

When I lie tangled in her hair 

And fettered to her eye, 
The birds that wanton in the air 

Know no such liber^. 

Lovelace thus forces us not only to give an 
arbitrary pronunciation to the final word of his 

258 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

refrain, but also to vary this arbitrary pronuncia- 
tion from stanza to stanza, awkwardly arresting 
our attention to no purpose, when we ought to 
be yielding ourselves absolutely to the charm of 
his most charming poem. Many another instance 
of this defect in craftsmanship can be discovered 
in the English poets, one of them in a lyric by 
that master of metrics, Poe, who opens the 
* Haunted Palace ' with a quatrain in which ten- 
anted is made to mate with head : 

In the greenest of our valleys, 

By good angels ier\?inted, 
Once a fair and stately palace — 

Radiant palace — reared its head. 

In the one poem of Walt Whitman's in which 
he seemed almost willing to submit to the bonds 
of rime and meter, and which— perhaps for that 
reason partly— is the lyric of his now best known 
and best beloved, in ' O Captain, My Captain,' 
certain of the rimes are possible only by putting 
an impossible stress upon the final syllables of 
both words of the pair: 

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting^ 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. 

And again : 

For you bouquets and ribbon'd w^reaths, for you the shores 

a-crowding ; 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning. 
259 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

In all these cases— Lovelace's, Poe's, Whit- 
man's—we find that the principle of Economy of 
Attention has been violated, with a resulting 
shock which diminishes somewhat our pleasure 
in the poems, delightful as they are, each in its 
several way. We have been called to bestow a 
momentary consideration on the mechanism of 
the poem, when we should have preferred to 
reserve all our power to receive the beauty of its 
spirit. 

It may be doubted whether any pronunciation, 
however violently dislocated, can justify Whit- 
tier's joining of bruised and crusade in his ' To 
England,' or Browning's conjunction of windows 
and Hindus in his 'Youth and Art' In ' Cris- 
tina' Browning tries to combine moments and 
endowments ; in his ' Another Way of Love ' he 
conjoins spider and consider ; and in his 'Solilo- 
quy in a Spanish Cloister' he binds together 
horse-hairs and corsairs. Perhaps one reason 
why Browning has made his way so slowly with 
the broad public— whom every poet must conquer 
at last, or in the end confess defeat— is that his 
rimes are sometimes violent and awkward, and 
sometimes complicated and arbitrary. The poet 
has reveled in his own ingenuity in compounding 
them, and so he flourishes them in the face of 
the reader. The principle of Economy of Atten- 
tion demands that in serious verse the rime must 
260 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

be not only so accurate as to escape remark, but 
also wholly unstrained. It must seem natural, 
necessary, obvious, even inevitable, or else our 
minds are wrested from a rapt contemplation of 
the theme to a disillusioning consideration of the 
sounds by which it is bodied forth. 

" Really the meter of some of the modern 
poems I have read," said Coleridge, ''bears about 
the same relation to meter, properly understood, 
that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exer- 
cise, and pretty severe too, I think." A master 
of meter Browning proved himself again and 
again, very inventive in the new rhythms he in- 
troduced, and almost unfailingly felicitous; and 
yet there are poems of his in which the rimes 
impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise. 
In the 'Glove,' for example, there not only 
abound manufactured rimes, each of which in 
turn arrests the attention, and each of which 
demands a most conscientious articulation before 
the ear can apprehend it, but with a persistent 
perversity the poet puts the abnormal combina- 
tion first, and puts last the normal word with 
which it is to be united in wedlock. Thus aghast 
I 'm precedes pastime, and well swear comes be- 
fore elsewhere. This is like presenting us with 
the answer before propounding the riddle. 

In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily van- 
quished may be a part of the joke, and an adroit 
261 



AN maUIRY AS TO RIME 

and unexpected rime may be a witticism in itself. 
But in the ' Ingoldsby Legends ' and in the ' Fable 
for Critics ' it is generally the common word that 
comes before the uncommon combination the 
alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a 
line of Barham's ends with Mephistopheles we 
wonder how he is going to solve the difficulty, 
and our expectation is swiftly gratified with 
coffee lees; and when Lowell informs us that 
Poe 

. . . talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, 

we bristle our ears while he adds: 

In a way to make people of common sense damn meters. 

But the 'Glove' is not comic in intent; the 
core of it is tragic, and the shell is at least ro- 
mantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant playfulness 
of treatment might not be out of keeping with 
the psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but 
not a few readers resentfully reject the misplaced 
ingenuity of the wilfully artificial double rimes. 
The incongruity between the matter of the poem 
and the manner of it attracts attention to the form, 
and leaves us the less for the fact. 

It would be interesting to know just why 
Browning chose to do what he did in the ' Glove ' 
and in more than one other poem. He had his 
reasons, doubtless, for he was no unconscious 
warbler of unpremeditated lays. If he refused to 
262 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention, 
he knew what he was doing. It was not from 
any heedlessness— like that of Emerson when he 
recklessly rimed woodpecker with bear ; or like 
that of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming 
the same woodpecker with hear. Emerson and 
Lowell— and Whittier also— it may be noted, 
were none of them enamoured of technic; and 
when a couplet or a quatrain or a stanza of theirs 
happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently 
they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a 
fortunate accident. They were not untiring 
students of versification, forever seeking to spy 
out its mysteries and to master its secrets, as 
Milton was, and Tennyson and Poe. 

And yet no critic has more satisfactorily ex- 
plained the essential necessity of avoiding dis- 
cords than did Lowell when he affirmed that 
" not only meter but even rime itself is not with- 
out suggestion in outward nature. Look at the 
pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray 
out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, 
how spray answers to spray, strophe and anti- 
strophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied 
ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of propor- 
tion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt 
the innate charm of rime who has seen the blue 
river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been 
ravished by the visible consonance of the tree 
263 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

growing at once toward an upward and a down- 
ward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or 
who has' watched how, as the kingfisher flitted 
from shore to shore, his visible echo flies under 
him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the 
visionary vault below ? . . . You must not only 
expect, but you must expect in the right way; 
you must be m.agnetized beforehand in every 
fiber by your own sensibility in order that you 
may feel what and how you ought." 

Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe, 
who declared that " what, in rime, first and prin- 
cipally pleases, may be referred to the human 
sense or appreciation of equality." But there is 
no equality in the sound of valleys and palace, 
and so the human sense is robbed of its plea- 
sure; and there is no consonance, visible or 
audible, between woodpecker and hear, and so 
we are suddenly demagnetized by our own sen- 
sibility, and cannot feel what and how we 
ought. 

So long as the poet gives us rim^es exact to the 
ear and completely satisfactory to the sense to 
which they appeal, he has solid ground beneath 
his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos 
come again. Admit given and heaven, and it is 
hard to deny chamber and remember. Having 
relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound, 
you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy. 
264 



AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME 

Allow shadow and meadozv to be legitimate, and 
how can you put the bar sinister on hear and 
woodpecker? Indeed, we fail to see how you 
can help feeling that John Phoenix was unduly 
harsh when he rejected the poem of a Young 
Astronomer beginning, " O would I had a tele- 
scope with fourteen slides!" on account of the 
atrocious attempt in the second line to rime 
Pleiades with slides. 

Lieutenant Derby was a humorist; but is his 
tying together of incompatible vocables much 
worse than one offense of which Keats is guilty ? 

Then who would go 

Into dark Soho, 
And chatter with dack'd-haired critics, 

When he can stay 

For the new-mown hay 
And startle the dappled prickets ? 

This quotation is due to Professor F. N. Scott, 
who has drawn attention also to an astounding 
quatrain of Tennyson's ' Palace of Art': 

Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea, 
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair 

Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily; 
An angel look'd at her. 

Professor Scott declares that he hesitates '' for 
a term by which to characterize such rimes as 
these. Certainly they are not eye-rimes in the 

265 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

proper meaning of that term. Perhaps . . . they 
may be called nose-rimes." 

Just as every instance of bad grammar inter- 
feres with the force of prose, so in verse every 
needless inversion and every defective rime in- 
terrupts the impression which the poet wishes to 
produce. There are really not so many in Pope's 
poems as there may seem to be, for since 
Queen Anne's day our language has modified its 
pronunciation here and there, leaving now only 
to the Irish the tea which is a perfect rime to 
obey, and the join which is a perfect rime to line. 

Perhaps the prevalence in English verse of the 
intolerable " allowable rimes " is due in part to an 
acceptance of what seems like an evil precedent, 
to be explained away by our constantly chang- 
ing pronunciation. Perhaps it is due in part also 
to the present wretched orthography of our lan- 
guage. The absurd " rimes to the eye " which 
abound in English are absent from Italian verse 
and from French. The French, as the inheritors 
through the Latin of the great Greek tradition, 
have a finer respect for form, and strive con- 
stantly for perfection of technic, altho the ge- 
nius of their language seems to us far less lyric 
than ours. Theodore de Banville, in his little 
book on French versification, declared formally 
and emphatically that there is no such thing as a 
poetic license. And Voltaire, in a passage ad- 
266 



AN INaUIRY AS TO RIME 

mirably rendered into English by the late Fred- 
erick Locker-Lampson, says that the French 
''insist that the rime shall cost nothing to the 
ideas, that it shall be neither trivial, nor too far- 
fetched; we exact vigorously in a verse the same 
purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do 
not admit the smallest license; we require an 
author to carry without a break all these chains, 
yet that he should appear ever free." 

In a language as unrhythmic as the French, 
rime is far more important than it need be in a 
lilting and musical tongue like our own; but in 
the masterpieces of the English lyrists, as in those 
of the French, rime plays along the edges of a 
poem, ever creating the expectation it swiftly 
satisfies and giving most pleasure when its pre- 
sence is felt and not flaunted. Like the dress of 
the well-bred woman, which sets off her beauty 
without attracting attention to itself, rime must 
be adequate and unobtrusive, neither too fine nor 
too shabby, but always in perfect taste. 

(1898- 1 900) 



267 



XI 

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE- 
NAMES 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

PLUTARCH tells us that the tragedian ^so- 
pus, when he spoke the opening lines of 
the * Atreus,' a tragedy by Attius, 

I 'm Lord of Aigos, heir of Pelops' crown. 
As far as Helle's sea and Ion's main 
Beat on the Isthmus, 

entered so keenly into the spirit of this lofty 
passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave 
who approached too near to the person of roy- 
alty; and Professor Tyrrel notes how these verses 
affect us with "the weight of names great in 
myth-land and hero-land," and he suggests that 
they produce "a vague impression of majesty," 
like Milton's 

Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban, 
Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond, 
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric's shore, 
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell 
By Fontarabia. 

It is a question how far the beauty of the reso- 
nant lines of the * Agamemnon ' of y^schylus, 
271 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

where the news of the fall of Troy is flashed 
along the chain of beacons from hilltop to pro- 
montory, is due even more to the mere sounds of 
the proper names than it is to the memories these 
mighty names evoke. Far inferior to this, and 
yet deriving its effect also from the sonorous roll 
of the lordly proper names (which had perhaps 
lingered in the poet's memory ever since the 
travels of his childhood), is the passage in the 
* Hernani ' of Victor Hugo, when, the new em- 
peror ordering all the conspirators to be set free 
who are not of noble blood, the hero steps for- 
ward hotly to declare his rank : 

Puisqu'il faut etre grand pour mourir, je me leve. 
Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna 
M'a fait due de Segorbe et due de Cardona, 
Marquis de Mouroy, comte Albatera, vicomte 
De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j 'ignore le compte. 
Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maitre d'Avis, ne 
Dans I'exil, fils proscrit d'un pere assassine 
Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille! 

Lowell, after telling us that " precisely what 
makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot 
explain any more than we can describe a per- 
fume," proceeds to point out that it is a prosaic 
passage of Drayton's ' Polyolbion ' which gave a 
hint to Wordsworth, thus finely utilized in one 
of the later bard's ' Poems on the Nammg of 
Places ' : 

272 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld 
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. 
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, 
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again; 
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag 
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar, 
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth 
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard, 
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone; 
Helvellyn, far into the clear blue sky, 
Carried the Lady's voice, — old Skiddaw blew 
His speaking-trumpet; — back out of the clouds 
Of Glaramara southward came the voice; 
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head. 

Not a little of this same magic is there in many 
a line of Walt Whitman ; especially did he rejoice 
to point out the beauty of Manahatta: 

I was asking something specific and perfect for my city, 
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name. 

Longfellow has recorded his feeling that 

The destined walls 
Of Cambalu and of Cathain Can 

(from the eleventh book of ' Paradise Lost ') is a 
" delicious line." Longfellow was always singu- 
larly sensitive to the magic power of words, and 
not long after that entry in his journal there is 
this other: "1 always write the name October 
with especial pleasure. There is a secret charm 
about it, not to be defined. It is full of memo- 
273 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

ries, it is full of dusky splendors, it is full of 
glorious poetry." And Poe was so taken with 
the melody of this same word that in ' Ulalume ' 
he invented a proper name merely that he might 
have a rime for it: 

It was night in the lonesome October 

Of my most immemorial year; 
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

In the misty mid-region of Weir — 
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, 

The charm of these Hnes is due mainly to their 
modulated music, and to the contrast of the 
vowel sounds in Auber and Weir, just as a great 
part of the beauty of Landor's exquisite lyric, 
'Rose Aylmer,' is contained in the name itself. 
Is there any other reason why Mesopotamia 
should be a " blessed word," save that its vowels 
and its consonants are so combined as to fill the 
ear with sweetness } Yet Mr. Lecky records 
Garrick's assertion that Whitefield could pro- 
nounce Mesopotamia so as to make a congregation 
weep. And others have found delight in repeat- 
ing a couplet of Campbell's: 

And heard across the waves' tumultuous roar 
The wolfs long howl from Oonalaska's shore — 

a delight due, 1 think, chiefly to the unexpected 

combination of open vowels and sharp conso- 

274 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

nants in the single Eskimo word, the meaning of 
it being unknown and wholly unimportant, and 
the sound of it filling the ear with an uncertain 
and yet awaited pleasure. 

Just as Oonalaska strikes us at once as the fit 
title for a shore along which the lone wolf should 
howl, so Atchafalaya bears in its monotonous 
vowel a burden of melancholy, made more piti- 
ful to us by our knowledge that it was the name 
of the dark water where Evangeline and Gabriel 
almost met in the night and then parted again 
for years. Charles Sumner wrote to Longfellow 
that Mrs. Norton considered *' the scene on the 
Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each 
other, so typical of life that she had a seal cut 
with that name upon it " ; and shortly afterward 
Leopold, the King of the Belgians, speaking of 
* Evangeline,' " asked her if she did not think the 
word Atchafalaya was suggestive of experience 
in life, and added that he was about to have it 
cut on a seal "—whereupon, to his astonishment, 
she showed him hers. 

It would be difficult indeed to declare how 
much of the delight our ear may take in these 
words— Atchafalaya, Oonalaska, Mesopotamia, 
—is due simply to their own melody, and how 
much to the memories they may stir. Here we 
may see one reason why the past seems so much 
more romantic than the present. In tales of 
275 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

olden time even the proper names linger in our 
ears with an echo of '' the glory that was Greece 
and the grandeur that was Rome." Here is, in 
fact, an unfair advantage which dead-and-gone 
heroes of foreign birth have over the men of our 
own day and our own country. " If we dilate in 
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it 
is that we are already domesticating the same 
sentiment," said Emerson in his essay on ' Hero- 
ism,' and he added that the first step of our 
worthiness was " to disabuse us of our supersti- 
tious associations with places and times." And 
he asks, " Why should these words, Athenian, 
Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear.^ 
Where the heart is, there the muses, there the 
gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. 
Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston 
Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves 
the names of foreign and classic topography. 
But here we are; and if we hurry a little, we may 
come to learn that here is best. . . . The Jer- 
seys were honest ground enough for Washing- 
ton to tread." 

Emerson penned these sentences in the first 
half of the nineteenth century, when we Ameri- 
cans were still fettered by the inherited shackles 
of colonialism. Fifty years after he wrote, it 
would have been hard to find an American who 
thought either Boston Bay or Massachusetts a 
276 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

paltry place. And Matthew Arnold has recorded 
that to him, when he was an undergraduate, 
Emerson was then " but a voice speaking from 
three thousand miles away; but so well he spoke 
that from that time forth Boston Bay and Con- 
cord were names invested to my ear with a sen- 
timent akin to that which invests for me the 
names of Oxford and Weimar." 

As for the Connecticut River, had not Thoreau 
done it the service Irving had rendered long be- 
fore to the Hudson .^— had he not given it a right 
to be set down in the geography of literature ? 
It is well that we should be reminded now and 
again that the map which the lover of letters has 
in his mind's eye is different by a whole world 
from the projection which the school-boy smears 
with his searching finger, since the tiny little 
rivers on whose banks great men grew to ma- 
turity, the Tiber and the Po, the Seine and the 
Thames, flow across its pages with a fuller 
stream than any Kongo or Amazon. And on 
this literary map the names of not a few Ameri- 
can rivers and hills and towns are now inscribed. 

It is fortunate that many of the American places 
most likely to be mentioned in the poetic gazet- 
teer have kept the liquid titles the aborigines 
gave them. " 1 climbed one of my hills yester- 
day afternoon and took a sip of Wachusett, who 
was well content that Monadnock was out of the 
277 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

way," wrote Lowell in a letter. "How lucky 
our mountains (many of them) are in their names, 
tho they must fmd it hard to live up to them 
sometimes! The Anglo-Saxon sponsor would 
Nicodemus 'em to nothing in no time." It will 
be pitiful if the Anglo-Saxons on the Pacific coast 
allow Mount Tacoma to be Nicodemused to 
Mount Rainier, as the Anglo-Saxons of the At- 
lantic coast allowed Lake Andiatarocte to be 
Nicodemused into Lake George. Fenimore 
Cooper strove in vain for the acceptance of Hori- 
con as the name of this lovely sheet of water, 
which the French discoverer called the Lake of 
the Holy Sacrament. 

Marquette spoke of a certain stream as the 
River of the Immaculate Conception, altho 
the Spaniards were already familiar with it as 
the River of the Holy Spirit; and later La Salle 
called it after Colbert; but an Algonquin word 
meaning '' many waters " clung to it always; and 
so we know it now as the Mississippi. The 
Spaniard has been gone from its banks for more 
than a hundred years, and the Frenchmian has 
followed the Indian, and the Anglo-Saxon now 
holds the mighty river from its source to its many 
mouths; but the broad stream bears to-day the 
name the red men gave it. And so also the Ohio 
keeps its native name, tho the French hesi- 
tated between St. Louis and La Belle Riviere 
278 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

as proper titles for it. Cataraqui is one old 
name for an American river, and Jacques Cartier 
accepted for this stream another Indian word, 
Hochelaga, but (as Professor Hinsdale reminded 
us) ** St. Lawrence, the name that Cartier had 
given to the Gulf, unfortunately superseded it." 

Much of the charm of these Indian words, 
Atchafalaya, Ohio, Andiatarocte, Tacoma, is due 
no doubt to their open vowels; but is not some 
of it to be ascribed to our ignorance of their 
meanings ? We may chance to know that Mis- 
sissippi signifies " many waters " and that Min- 
nehaha can be interpreted as ''laughing water," 
but that is the furthermost border of our know- 
ledge. If we were all familiar with the Algon- 
quin dialects, I fancy that the fascination of many 
of these names would fade swiftly. And yet 
perhaps it would not, for we could never be on 
as friendly terms with the Indian language as we 
are with our own ; and there is ever a suggestion 
of the mystic in the foreign tongue. 

We engrave Souvenir on our sweetheart's 
bracelet or brooch; but the French for this pur- 
pose prefer Remember. " The difficulty of trans- 
lation lies in the color of words," Longfellow 
declared. " Is the Italian ruscilletto gorgoglioso 
fully rendered by gurgling brooklet? Or the 
Spanish pajaros vocingleros by garrulous birds ? 
Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only 
279 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds; 
and to the Italian and Spanish ear the English 
words may seem equally beautiful." 

After the death of the Duke of Wellington, 
Longfellow wrote a poem on the ' Warden of 
the Cinque Ports ' ; and to us Americans there was 
poetry in the very title. And yet it may be 
questioned whether the Five Ports are necessarily 
any more poetic than the Five Points or the 
Seven Dials. So also Sanguelac strikes us as far 
loftier than Bloody Pond, but is it really ? I have 
wondered often whether to a Jew of the first 
century Aceldama, the field of blood, and Golgo- 
tha, the place of a skull, were not perfectly com- 
monplace designations, quite as common, in fact, 
as Bone Gulch or Hangman's Hollow would be 
to us, and conveying the same kind of suggestion. 

We are always prone to accept the unknown 
as the magnificent, —if I may translate the Latin 
phrase, —to put a higher value on the things veiled 
from us by the folds of a foreign language. The 
Bosporus is a more poetic place than Oxford, 
tho the meaning of both namies is the same. 
Montenegro fills our ears and raises our expecta- 
tions higher than could any mere Black Mountain. 
The " Big River" is but a vulgar nickname, and 
yet we accept the equivalent Guadalquivir and 
Rio Grande; we even allow ourselves sometimes 
to speak of the Rio Grande River— which is as 
280 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

tautological as De Quincey declared the name of 
Mrs. Barbauld to be. Bridgeport is as prosaic 
as may be, while Alcantara has a remote and 
romantic aroma, and yet the latter word signifies 
only "the bridge." We can be neighborly, 
most of us, with the White Mountains; but we 
feel a deeper respect for Mont Blanc and the 
Weisshorn and the Sierra Nevada. 

Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily 
to force them into an imported falsehood. El- 
beron, where Garfield died, was founded by one 
L. B. Brown, so they say, and the homely name 
of the owner was thus contorted to make a seem- 
ingly exotic appellation for the place. And they 
say also that the man who once dammed a brook 
amid the pines of New Jersey had three children, 
Carrie, Sally, and Joe, and that he bestowed their 
united names upon Lake Carasaljo, the artificial 
piece of water on the banks of which Lakewood 
now sits salubriously. In Mr. Cable's 'John 
March, Southerner,' one of the characters ex- 
plains: "You know an ancestor of his founded 
Suez. That 's how it got its name. His name 
was Ezra and hers was Susan, don't you see ? " 
And I have been told of a town on the Northern 
Pacific Railroad which the first comers called 
Hell-to-Pay, and which has since experienced a 
change of heart and become Eltopia. 

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

thirst for self-improvement raged among the vil- 
lages of the lower Hudson River, and many a 
modest settlement thought to better itself and to 
rise in the world by the assumption of a more 
swelling style and title. When a proposition was 
made to give up the homely Dobbs Ferry for 
something less plebeian, the poet of ' Nothing to 
Wear' rimed a pungent protest: 

They say " Dobbs " ain't melodious; 
It 's " horrid," " vulgar," *' odious"; 

In all their crops it sticks; 
And then the worse addendum 
Of " Ferry " does offend 'em 

More than its vile prefix. 
Well, it does seem distressing, 
But, if I 'm good at guessing, 

Each one of these same nobs 
If there was money in it, 
Would ferry in a minute, 

And change his name to Dobbs! 

That 's it— they 're not partic'lar 
Respecting the auric'lar 

At a stiff market rate; 
But Dobbs's special vice is 
That he keeps down the prices 

Of all their real estate ! 
A name so unattractive 
Keeps villa-sites inactive. 

And spoils the broker's jobs; 
They think that speculation 
Would rage at " Paulding's Station," 

Which stagnates now at " Dobbs." 
282 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

In the later stanzas Mr. Butler denounces 
changes nearer to New York: 

Down there, on old Manhattan, 
Where land-sharks breed and fatten, 

They wiped out Tubby Hook. 
That famous promontory, 
Renowned in song and story, 

Which time nor tempest shook, 
Whose name for aye had been good, 
Stands newly christened " Inwood," 

And branded with the shame 
Of some old rogue who passes 
By dint of aliases, 

Afraid of his own name! 

See how they quite outrival 
Plain barn-yard Spuyten Duyvil 

By peacock Riverdale, 
Which thinks all else it conquers. 
And over homespun Yonkers 

Spreads out its flaunting tail! 

No loyal Manhattaner but would regret to part 
with Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers and Harlem, 
and the other good old names that recall the good 
old Dutchmen who founded New Amsterdam. 
Few loyal Manhattaners, I think, but would be 
glad to see the Greater New York (now at last 
an accomplished fact) dignified by a name less 
absurd than New York. If Pesth and Buda could 
come together and become Budapest, why may 
not the Greater New York resume the earlier 
283 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

name and be known to the world as Manhattan ? 
Why should the people of this great city of ours 
let the Anglo-Saxons " Nicodemus us to nothing," 
or less than nothing, with a name so pitiful as 
New York? ''I hope and trust," wrote Wash- 
ington Irving, " that we are to live to be an old 
nation, as well as our neighbors, and have no 
idea that our cities when they shall have attained 
to venerable antiquity shall still be dubbed New 
York and New London and new this and new 
that, like the Pont Neuf (the new bridge) at Paris, 
which is the oldest bridge in that capital, or like 
the Vicar of Wakefield's horse, which continued 
to be called the colt until he died of old age." 

Whenever any change shall be made we must 
hope that the new will be not only more eupho- 
nious than the old, but more appropriate and 
more stately. Perhaps Hangtown in California 
made a change for the better many years ago 
when it took the name of Placerville; but per- 
haps Placerville was not the best name it could 
have taken. *' We will be nothing but Anglo- 
Saxons in the old world or in the new," wrote 
Matthew Arnold when he was declaring the 
beauty of Celtic literature; "and when our race 
has built Bold Street in Liverpool, and pro- 
nounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlan- 
tic, and builds Nashville and Jacksonville and 
Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs 
284 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

of Providence in an incomparable manner." In 
this sentence the criticism cuts both British habits 
and American. Later in life Matthew Arnold 
sharpened his knife again for use on the United 
States alone. "What people," he asked, "in 
whom the sense for beauty and fitness was 
quick, could have invented or tolerated the hide- 
ous names ending in vtlle — the Briggsvilles, 
Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles— rife from Maine to 
Florida ? " 

Now, it must be confessed at once that we 
have no guard against a thrust like that. Such 
names do abound and they are of unsurpassed 
hideousness. But could not the same blow have 
got home as fatally had it been directed against 
his own country ? A glance at any gazetteer of 
the British Isles would show that the British are 
quite as vulnerable as the Americans. In fact, 
this very question of Matthew Arnold's sug- 
gested to an anonymous American rimester the 
perpetration of a copy of verses, the quality of 
which can be gaged by these first three stanzas : 

Of Briggsville and Jacksonville 

I care not now to sing; 
They make me sad and very mad — 

My inmost soul they v^ring. 
1 '11 hie me back to England, 

And straightway I will go 
To Boxford and to Swaff ham, 

To Plunger and Loose Hoe. 
285 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

At Scrooby and at Gonerby, 

At Wigton and at Smeeth, 
At Bottesford and Runcorn, 

I need not grit my teeth. 
At Swineshead and at Crummock, 

At Sibsey and Spithead, 
Stoke Poges and Wolsoken 

I will not wish me dead. 

At Horbling and at Skidby, 

At Chipping Ongar, too, 
At Botterel Stotterdon and Swops, 

At Skellington and Skew, 
At Piddletown and Blumsdown, 

At Shanklin and at Smart, 
At Gosberton and Wrangle 

I '11 soothe this aching heart. 

To discover a mote in our neighbor's eyes does 
not remove the mote in our own, however much 
immediate relief it may give us from the acute- 
ness of our pain. When Matthew Arnold ani- 
madverted upon " the jumbles of unnatural and 
inappropriate names everywhere," he may have 
had in mind the most absurd medley existing 
anywhere in the world— the handful of Greek 
and Roman names of all sorts which was sown 
broadcast over the western part of New York 
State. Probably this region of misfortune it was 
that Irving was thinking about when he de- 
nounced the " shallow affectation of scholarship," 
and told how ''the whole catalog of ancient 
286 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

worthies is shaken out of the back of Lempriere's 
Classical Dictionary, and a wide region of wild 
country is sprinkled over with the names of 
heroes, poets, sages of antiquity, jumbled into 
the most whimsical juxtaposition." 

Along the road from Dublin, going south to 
Bray, the traveler finds Dumdrum and Stillor- 
gan, as tho— to quote the remarks of the Irish 
friend who gave me these facts— a band of 
wandering musicians had broken up and scat- 
tered their names along the highway. For sheer 
ugliness it would be hard to beat two other 
proper names near Dublin, where the Sallynoggin 
road runs into the Glenageary. 

It may be that these words sound harsher in 
our strange ears than they do to a native wonted 
to their use. We take the unknown for the 
magnificent sometimes, no doubt; but sometimes 
also we take it for the ridiculous. To us New- 
Yorkers, for instance, there is nothing absurd or 
ludicrous in the sturdy name of Schenectady; 
perhaps there is even a hint of stateliness in the 
syllables. But when Mr. Laurence Hutton was 
in the north of Scotland some years ago there 
happened to be in his party a young lady from 
that old Dutch town; and when a certain laird 
who lived in those parts chanced to be told that 
this young lady dwelt in Schenectady he was 
moved to inextinguishable laughter. He ejacu- 
287 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

lated the outlandish sounds again and again in 
the sparse intervals of his boisterous merriment. 
He announced to all his neighbors that among 
their visitors was a young lady from Schenectady, 
and all who called were presented to her, and at 
every repetition of the strange syllables his vio- 
lent cachinnations broke forth afresh. Never had 
so comic a name fallen upon his ears; and yet he 
himself was the laird of Balduthro (pronounced 
Balduthy) ; his parish was Ironcross (pronounced 
Aron-crouch) ; his railway-station was Kilcon- 
quhar (pronounced Kinocher) ; and his post-office 
was Pittenweem! 

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotchman who 
had changed his point of view more often than 
the laird of Balduthro; he had a broader vision 
and a more delicate ear and a more refined per- 
ception of humor. When he came to these 
United States as an amateur immigrant on his 
way across the plains, he asked the name of a 
river from a brakeman on the train ; and when he 
heard that the stream " was called the Susque- 
hanna, the beauty of the name seemed part and 
parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam 
with divine fitness named the creatures, so this 
word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the 
fancy. That was the name, as no other could 
be, for that shining river and desirable valley." 

And then Stevenson breaks from his narrative 
288 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

to sing the praises of our place-names. The 
passage is long for quotation in a paper where 
too much has been quoted already; and yet I 
should be derelict to my duty if I did not tran- 
scribe it here. Stevenson had lived among many 
peoples, and he was far more cosmopolitan than 
Matthew Arnold, and more willing, therefore, to 
dwell on beauties than on blemishes. " None 
can care for literature in itself," he begins, " who 
do not take a special pleasure in the sound of 
names; and there is no part of the world where 
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and 
picturesque as the United States of America. 
All times, races, and languages have brought 
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State 
with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with San- 
dusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of 
red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is 
own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; 
there they have their seat, translated names of 
cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee 
and Arkansas. . . . Old, red Manhattan lies, 
like an Indian arrow-head under a steam-factory, 
below Anglified New York. The names of the 
States and Territories themselves form a chorus 
of sweet and most romantic vocables : Delaware, 
Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, 
Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few 
poems with a nobler music for the ear; a song- 
289 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

ful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall 
arise from the western continent, his verse will 
be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with 
the names of states and cities that would strike 
the fancy in a business circular." 

As Campbell had utilized the innate beauty of 
the word Wyoming, so Stevenson himself made 
a ballad on the dreaded name of Ticonderoga; 
and these are two of the proper names of mod- 
ern America that sing themselves. But there is 
nothing canorous in Anglified New York; there 
is no sonority in its syllables; there is neither 
dignity nor truth in its obvious meaning. It 
might serve well enough as the address of a 
steam-factory in a business circular; but it lacks 
absolutely all that the name of a metropolis de- 
mands. Stevenson thought that the new Homer 
would joy in working into his strong lines the 
beautiful nomenclature of America; but Wash- 
ington Irving had the same anticipation, and it 
forced him to declare that if New York " were to 
share the fate of Troy itself, to suffer a ten years' 
siege, and be sacked and plundered, no modern 
Homer would ever be able to elevate the name 
to epic dignity." Irving went so far as to wish 
not only that New York city should be Manhat- 
tan again, but that New York State should be 
Ontario, the Hudson River the Mohegan, and the 
United States themselves Appalachia. Edgar 
290 



ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES 

Allan Poe, than whom none of our poets had a 
keener perception of the beauty of sounds and 
the fitness of words, approved of Appalachia as 
the name of the whole country. 

Perhaps we must wait yet a little while for 

Appalachia and Ontario and the Mohegan; but 

has not the time come to dig up that old red 

arrow-head Manhattan, and fit it to a new shaft ? 

(1895) 



291 



XII 
AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 



[This paper is here reprinted from an earlier volume now out 
of print.] 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING" 

WHEN the author of the 'Cathedral' was 
accosted by the wandering Englishmen 
within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a 
joke, 

Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends. 
The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed. 
Abolished in the truce of common speech 
And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue. 

In this common speech other Englishmen are 
not always ready to acknowledge the full rights 
of Lowell's countrymen. They would put us 
off with but a younger brother's portion of the 
mother-tongue, seeming somehow to think that 
they are more closely related to the common 
parent than we are. But Orlando, the younger 
son of Sir Rowland du Bois, was no villain; and 
tho we have broken with the fatherland, the 
mother-tongue is none the less our heritage. 
Indeed, we need not care whether the division is 
per stirpes or per capita ; our share is not the less 
in either case. 

295 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING" 

Beneath the impotent protests which certain 
British newspapers are prone to make every 
now and again against the ''American language " 
as a whole, and against the stray Americanism 
which has happened last to invade England, there 
is a tacit assumption that we Americans are outer 
barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering 
with something which belongs to the British 
exclusively. And the outcry against the " Ameri- 
can language" is not as shrill nor as piteous as 
the shriek of horror v/ith which certain of the 
journals of London greet "American spelling," a 
hideous monster which they feared was ready to 
devour them as soon as the international copyright 
bill should become law. In the midst of every dis- 
cussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great 
Britain, the bugbear of "American spelling" 
reared its grisly head. The London Times de- 
clared that English publishers would never put 
any books into type in the United States because 
the people of England would never tolerate the 
peculiarities of orthography which prevailed in 
American printing-offices. The St. James's Ga- 
:{ette promptly retorted that "already newspapers 
in London are habitually using the ugliest forms 
of American spelling, and these silly eccentricities 
do not make the slightest difference in their cir- 
culation." The Times and the St. James's Gazette 
might differ as to the effect of the copyright act 
296 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

on the profits of the printers of England, but 
they agreed heartily as to the total depravity of 
** American spelling." I think that any disinte- 
rested foreigner who might chance to hear these 
violent outcries would suppose that English 
orthography was as the law of the Medes and 
Persians, which altereth not; he would be justi- 
fied in believing that the system of spelling now 
in use in Great Britain was hallowed by the 
Established Church, and in some way mysteri- 
ously connected with the state religion. 

Just what the British newspapers were afraid of 
it is not easy to say, and it is difficult to declare 
just what they mean when they talk of "Ameri- 
can spelling." Probably they do not refer to the 
improvements in orthography suggested by the 
first great American — Benjamin Franklin. Pos- 
sibly they do refer to the modifications in the 
accepted spelling proposed by another American, 
Noah Webster — not so great, and yet not to be 
named slightingly by any one who knows how 
fertile his labors have been for the good of the 
whole country. Noah Webster, so his bio- 
grapher, Mr. Scudder, tells us, "was one of the 
first to carry a spirit of democracy into letters. . . . 
Throughout his work one may detect a confi- 
dence in the common sense of the people which 
was as firm as Franklin's." But the innovations 
of Webster were hesitating and often inconsistent; 
297 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

and most of them have been abandoned by later 
editors of Webster's American Dictionary of the 
English Language. 

What, then, do British writers mean when 
they animadvert upon "American spelling"? 
So far as I have been able to discover, the British 
journalists object to certain minor labor-saving 
improvements of American orthography, such as 
the dropping of the k from almanack, the omis- 
sion of one g from waggon, and the like; and 
they protest with double force, with all the 
strength that in them lies, against the substitu- 
tion of a single / for a double / in such words as 
traveller, against the omission of the u from such 
words as bonotir, against the substitution of an 
5 for a <:: in such words as defence, and against 
the transposing of the final two letters of such 
words as theatre. The objection to "American 
spelling" may lie deeper than I have here sug- 
gested, and it may have a wider application; but 
1 have done my best to state it fully and fairly as 
I have deduced it from a painful perusal of many 
columns of exacerbated British writing. 

Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly 
the extent of the British journalistic objections to 
"American spelling," the unprejudiced reader 
may be moved to ask: "Is this all.? Are these 
few and slight and unimportant changes the 
cause of this mighty commotion.?" One may 



AS TO '* AMERICAN SPELLING 

agree with Sainte-Beuve in thinking that "or- 
thography is the beginning of literature," with- 
out discovering in these modifications from the 
Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust. 
And since I have quoted Sainte-Beuve once, I 
venture to cite him again, and to take from the 
same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion 
that "if we write more correctly, let it be to ex- 
press especiallyhonest feelings and just thoughts." 

Feelings may be honest tho they are violent, 
but irritation is not the best frame of mind for 
just thinking. The tenacity with which some of 
the newspapers of London are wont to defend 
the accepted British orthography is perhaps due 
rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell told 
us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with 
as tierce a flame as ever once theological hatred; 
and any American who chances to note the force 
and the fervor and the frequency of the objurga- 
tions against "American spelling " in the columns 
of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the 
Athenceum, may find himself wondering as to 
the date of the papal bull which declared the in- 
fallibility of contemporary British orthography, 
and as to the place where the council of the 
church was held at which it was made an article 
of faith. 

The Saturday Review and the Athenceum, 
highly pitched as their voices are, yet are scarcely 
299 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

shriller in their cry to arms against the possible 
invasion of the sanctity of British orthography 
by "American spelling" than is the London 
Times, the solid representative of British thought, 
the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet 
the Times is not without orthographic eccentrici- 
ties of its own, as Matthew Arnold took occa- 
sion to point out. In his essay on the ' Literary 
Influence of Academies,' he asserted that "every 
one has noticed the way in which the Times 
chooses to spell the word diocese; it always 
spells it diocess, deriving it, I suppose, from 
Zeus and census. . . . Imagine an educated 
Frenchman indulging himself in an orthographi- 
cal antic of this sort! " 

When we read what is written in the Times 
and the Saturday Review and the Athenceum, 
sometimes in set articles on the subject, and 
even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs 
in the course of book-reviews, we wonder at 
the vehemence of the feeling displayed. If we 
did not know that ancient abuses are often de- 
fended with more violence and with louder shouts 
than inheritances of less doubtful worth, we 
might suppose that the present spelling of the 
English language was in a condition perfectly 
satisfactory alike to scholar and to student. 
Such, however, is not the case. The leading 
philologists of Great Britain and of the United 
300 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

States have repeatedly denounced English spell- 
ing as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic, 
Professor Max MuUer at Oxford being no less em- 
phatic than Professor Whitney at Yale. There 
is now living no scholar of any repute who any 
longer defends the ordinary orthography of the 
English language. 

The fact is that a little learning is quite as dan- 
gerous a thing now as it was in Pope's day. 
Those who are volubly denouncing "American 
spelling " in the columns of British journals are 
not students of the history of English speech; 
they are not scholars in English; in so far as they 
know anything of the language, they are but 
amateur philologists. As a well-known writer 
on spelling reform once neatly remarked, "The 
men who get their etymology by inspiration are 
like the poor in that we have them always with 
us." Altho few of them are as ignorant and 
dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tor- 
tured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a 
ridiculously impossible Welsh rarebit, still the 
most of their writing serves no good purpose. 
Nor do we discover in these specimens of British 
journalism that abundant urbanity which ety- 
mology might lead us to look for in the writing 
of inhabitants of so large a city as London. 

Any one who takes the trouble to inform him- 
self on the subject will soon discover that it is 
301 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

chiefly the half-educated men who defend the con- 
temporary orthography of the EngHsh language, 
and who denounce the alleged "American spell- 
ing" of center and honor. The uneducated 
reader may wonder perchance what the g is 
doing in sovereign; the half-educated reader dis- 
cerns in the g a connecting-link between the 
English sovereign and the Latin regno; the well- 
educated reader knows that there is no philolo- 
gical connection whatever between regno and 
sovereign. 

Most of those who write with ease in British 
journals, deploring the prevalence of "American 
spelling," have never carried their education so 
far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which 
prevents a man from expressing an opinion on 
subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object 
of education, it has been said, is to make a man 
know what he knows, and also to know how 
much he does not know. Despite the close 
sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a 
student of optics is not necessarily qualified to 
express an opinion in esthetics; and on the other 
hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of 
science. Now literature is one of the arts, and 
philology is a science. Altho men of letters 
have to use words as the tools of their trade, 
orthography is none the less a branch of philology, 
and philology does not come by nature. Litera- 
302 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING 

ture may even exist without writing, and there- 
fore without spelling. Writing, indeed, has 
no necessary connection with literature; still less 
has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a 
scientific student of language; he has no need to 
be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty 
for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast 
of it is unseemly. 

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of 
the "American spelling" which the British jour- 
nalists denounce. This "American spelling" is 
less absurd than the British spelling only in so 
far as it has varied therefrom. Even in these 
variations there is abundant absurdity. Once 
upon a time most words that now are spelled 
with a final c had an added k. Even now both 
British and American usage retains this h in ham- 
mock, altho both British and Americans have 
dropped the needless letter from havoc ; while the 
British retain the k at the end of almanack and 
the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson 
was a reactionary in orthography as in politics; 
and in his dictionary he wilfully put a final k 
to words like optick, without being generally 
followed by the publick — as he would have 
spelled it. Music was then musick, altho, even 
as late as Aubrey's time, it had been musique. 
In our own day we are witnessing the very 
gradual substitution of the logical technic for 
303 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

the form originally imported from France — 
technique. 

I am inclined to think that technic is replacing 
technique more rapidly — or should I say less 
slowly? — in the United States than in Great 
Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our 
words and to make them our own, while the 
British have rather a fondness for foreign phrases. 
A London journalist recently held up to public 
obloquy as an "ignorant Americanism" the 
word program, altho he would have found it 
set down in Professor Skeat's Etymological 
Dictionary. ''Programme was taken from the 
French," so a recent writer reminds us, "and in 
violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was 
imported into English, we had already anagram, 
cryptogram, diagram, epigram, etc." The logical 
form program is not common even in America; 
and British writers seem to prefer the French 
form, as British speakers still give a French pro- 
nunciation to charade, and to trait, which in 
America have long since been accepted frankly as 
English words. 

Possibly it is idle to look for any logic in any- 
thing which has to do with modern English 
orthography on either side of the ocean. Per- 
haps, however, there is less even than ordinary 
logic in the British journalist's objection to the 
so-called "American spelling " of meter ; for why 
304 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING 

should any one insist on metre while, unhesitatingly 
accepting its compound diameter? Mr. John 
Bellows, in the preface to his inestimable French- 
English and English-French pocket dictionary, 
one of the very best books of reference ever pub- 
lished, informs us that ''the act of Parliament 
legalizing the use of the metric system in this 
country [England] gives the words meter, liter, 
gram, etc., spelled on the American plan." Per- 
haps now that the sanction of law has been given 
to this spelling, the final er will drive out the re 
which has usurped its place. In one of the last 
papers that he wrote, Lowell declared that " cen- 
ter is no Americanism; it entered the language 
in that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe. " 
" In the sixteenth and in the first half of the sev- 
enteenth century," says Professor Lounsbury, 
" while both ways of writing these words existed 
side by side, the termination er is far more com- 
mon than that in re. The first complete edition 
of Shakspere's plays was published in 1623. In 
that work sepiilcher occurs thirteen times; it is 
spelled eleven times with er. Scepter occurs 
thirty-seven times; it is not once spelled with re, 
but always with er. Center occurs twelve times, 
and in nine instances out of the twelve it ends in 
er." So we see that this so-called "American 
spelling" is fully warranted by the history of the 
English language. It is amusing to note how 
305 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

often a wider and a deeper study of English will 
reveal that what is suddenly denounced in Great 
Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether 
this be a variation in speech or in spelling, is 
shown to be really a survival of a previous usage 
of our language, and authorized by a host of 
precedents. 

Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of 
progress, and no doubt in due season Great 
Britain and her colonial dependencies will be 
content again to spell words that end in er as 
Shakspere and Ben Jonson and Spenser spelled 
them. But when we get so far toward the or- 
thographic millennium that we all spell sepiilcher, 
the ghost of Thomas Campbell will groan within 
the grave at the havoc then wrought in the final 
line of * Hohenlinden,' which will cease to end 
with even the outward semblance of a rime to 
the eye. We all know that 

On Linden, when the sun was low. 
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, 
And dark as winter was the flow 
Of Iser, rolling rapidly; 

and those of us who have persevered may re- 
member that with one exception every fourth 
line of Campbell's poem ends with 2i y, — the 
words are rapidly, scenery, revelry, artillery, 
canopy, and chivalry, — not rimes of surpassing 
306 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

distinction, any of them, but perhaps passable 
to a reader who will humor the final syllable. 
The one exception is the final line of the poem- 
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre. 

To no man's ear did sepulchre ever rime justly 
with chivalry and canopy and artillery, altho 
Campbell may have so contorted his vision that 
he evoked the dim spook of a rime in his mind's 
eye. A rime to the eye is a sorry thing at best, 
and it is sorriest when it depends on an inaccu- 
rate and evanescent orthography. 

Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in 
and leaving out of the u in words like honor and 
governor as he was in many other things; and 
the makers of later dictionaries have departed 
widely from his practice, those in Great Britain 
still halting half-way, while those in the United 
States have gone on to the bitter end. The il- 
logic of the burly lexicographer is shown in his 
omission of the u from exterior and posterior, 
and his retention of it in the kindred words in- 
teriour and anteriour ; this, indeed, seems like 
wilful perversity, and justifies Hood's merry jest 
about "Dr. Johnson's Contradictionary." The 
half-way measures of later British lexicographers 
are shown in their omission of the m from words 
which Dr. Johnson spelled emperour, governour, 
307 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING 

oratour, horrour, and dolouTj while still retain- 
ing it m favour and honour and a few others. 

The reason for his disgust generally given by 
the London man of letters who is annoyed by 
the "American spelling" of ho7ior and favor is 
that these words are not derived directly from the 
Latin, but indirectly through the French ; this is the 
plea put forward by the late Archbishop Trench. 
Even if this plea were pertinent, the application 
of this theory is not consistent in current British 
orthography, which prescribes the omission of 
the u from error and emperor, and its retention 
in colour and honour — altho all four words are 
alike derived from the Latin through the French. 
And this plea fails absolutely to account for the 
u which the British insist on preserving in har- 
bour 2ind in neighbour, words not derived from 
the Latin at all, whether directly or indirectly 
through the French. An American may well 
ask, *Mf the u in honour teaches etymology, 
what does the u in harbour teach } " There is 
no doubt that the u in harbour teaches a false 
etymology; and there is no doubt also that the 
u in honour has been made to teach a false ety- 
mology, for Trench's derivation of this final our 
from the French eur is absurd, as the old French 
was our, and sometimes ur, sometimes even or. 
Pseudo-philology of this sort is no new thing; 
Professor Max Muller noted that the Roman 
308 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING 

prigs used to spell cena (to show their knowledge 
of Greek), coena, as if the word were somehow 
connected with kolvti. 

Thus we see that the u in honour suggests a 
false etymology; so does the ue in tongue, and 
the g in sovereign, and the c in scent, and the s 
in island, and the mp in comptroller, and the h 
in rhyme ; and there are many more of our ordi- 
nary orthographies which are quite as misleading 
from a philological point of view. As the late 
Professor Hadley mildly put it, "our common 
spelling is often an untrustworthy guide to ety- 
mology." But why should we expect or desire 
spelling to be a guide to etymology } If it is to 
be a guide at all, we may fairly insist on its being 
trustworthy; and so we cannot help thinking 
scorn of those who insist on retaining a superflu- 
ous u in harbour. 

But why should orthography be made subser- 
vient to etymology } What have the two things 
in common } They exist for wholly different 
ends, to be attained by wholly different means. 
To bend either from its own work to the aid of 
the other is to impair the utility of both. This 
truth is recognized by all etymologists, and by 
all students of language, altho it has not yet 
found acceptance among men of letters, who are 
rarely students of language in the scientific sense. 
"It may be observed," Mr. Sweet declares, 
309 



AS TO ''AMERICAN SPELLING 

"that it is mainly among the class of half-taught 
dabblers in philology that etymological spelling 
has found its supporters " ; and he goes on to 
say that ''all true philologists and philological 
bodies have uniformly denouncedit as a monstrous 
absurdity both from a practical and a scientific point 
of view." I should never dare to apply to the late 
Archbishop Trench and the London journalists 
who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr. 
Sweet's "half-taught dabblers in philology"; 
but when a fellow-Briton uses it perhaps I may 
venture to quote it without reproach. 

As I have said before, the alleged "American 
spelling " differs but very slightly from that 
which prevails in England. A wandering New- 
Yorker who rambles through London is able to 
collect now and again evidences of orthographic 
survivals which give him a sudden sense of being 
in an older country than his own. I have seen a 
man whose home was near Gramercy Park stop 
short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair, 
and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of 
paper across the glass door of a bar proclaiming 
that CYDER was sold within. I have seen the 
same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of 
a chymist in the window of which corn-plaisters 
were offered for sale. He wondered why a 
British house should have storeys when an 
American house has stories ; and he disliked in- 
310 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

tensely the wanton e wherewith British printers 
have recently disfigured form, which in the latest 
London typographical vocabularies appears as 
forme. This e in form is a gratuitous addition, 
and therefore contrary to the trend of ortho- 
graphic progress, which aims at the suppression 
of all arbitrary and needless letters. 

The so-called "American spelling" differs 
from the spelling which obtains in England only 
in so far as it has yielded a little more readily to 
the forces which make for progress, for uniform- 
ity, for logic, for common sense. But just how 
fortuitous and chaotic the condition of English 
spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and 
in the United States no man knows who has not 
taken the trouble to investigate for himself. In 
England, the reactionary orthography of Samuel 
Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In Amer- 
ica, the revolutionary orthography of Noah 
Webster has been receded from even by his own 
inheritors. There is no standard, no authority, 
not even that of a powerful, resolute, and domi- 
neering personality. 

Perhaps the attitude of philologists toward 
the present spelling of the English language, and 
their opinion of those who are up in arms in de- 
fense of it, have never been more tersely stated 
than in Professor Lounsbury's most admirable 
* Studies in Chaucer,' a work which 1 should term 
3n 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps 
give a false impression of a book wherein the re- 
sults of learning are set forth with the most adroit 
literary art, and with an uninsistent but omni- 
present humor, which is a constant delight to the 
reader: 

''There is certainly nothing more contempti- 
ble than our present spelling, unless it be the 
reasons usually given for clinging to it. The 
divorce which has unfortunately almost always 
existed between English letters and English 
scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed ex- 
hibition of itself than in the comments which 
men of real literary ability make upon proposals 
to change or modify the cast-iron framework in 
which our words are now clothed. On one side 
there is an absolute agreement of view on the 
part of those who are authorized by their know- 
ledge of the subject to pronounce an opinion. 
These are well aware that the present ortho- 
graphy hides the history of the word instead of 
revealing it; that it is a stumbling-block in the 
way of derivation or of pronunciation instead of 
a guide to it; that it is not in any sense a growth 
or development, but a mechanical malformation, 
which owes its existence to the ignorance of 
early printers and the necessity of consulting the 
convenience of printing-offices. This consensus 
of scholars makes the slightest possible impres- 
312 



AS TO * AMERICAN SPELLING 

sion upon men of letters throughout the whole 
great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly 
one of them who is not calmly confident of the 
superiority of his opinion to that of the most 
famous special students who have spent years in 
examining the subject. There is hardly one of 
them who does not fancy he is manifesting a 
noble conservatism by holding fast to some spell- 
ing peculiarly absurd, and thereby maintaining a 
bulwark against the ruin of the tongue. There 
is hardly one of them who has any hesitation in 
discussing the question in its entirety, while 
every word he utters shows that he does not 
understand even its elementary principles. There 
would be something thoroughly comic in turn- 
ing into a fierce international dispute the question 
of spelling honor without the u, were it not for 
the depression which every student of the lan- 
guage cannot well help feeling in contemplating 
the hopeless abysmal ignorance of the history of 
the tongue which any educated man must first 
possess in order to become excited over the sub- 
ject at all." ('Studies in Chaucer,' vol. iii., pp. 
265-267.) 

Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing. 
Sometimes it is going further and further away 
from the orthography; for example, either and 
neither are getting more and more to have in 
their first syllable the long / sound instead of the 
3^3 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 

long e sound which they had once. Sometimes 
it is being modified to agree with the orthogra- 
phy; for example, the older pronunciations of 
again to rime with men, and of been to rime 
with pin, in which I was carefully trained as a 
boy, seem to me to be giving way before a pro- 
nunciation in exact accord with the spelling, 
again to rime with pain, and been to rime 
with seen. These two illustrations are from the 
necessarily circumscribed experience of a single 
observer, and the observation of others may not 
bear me out in my opinion; but tho the illustra- 
tions fall to the ground, the main assertion, that 
pronunciation is changing, is indisputable. 

No doubt the change is less rapid than it was 
before the invention of printing; far less rapid 
than it was before the days of the public school 
and of the morning newspaper. There are vari- 
ations of pronunciation in different parts of the 
United States and of Great Britain, as there are 
variations of vocabulary; but in the future there 
will be a constantly increasing tendency for 
these variations to disappear. There are irre- 
sistible forces making for uniformity — forces 
which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Ger- 
many, Provencal in France, Romansch in Swit- 
zerland. There is a desire to see a standard set 
up to which all may strive to conform.. In 
France a standard of pronunciation is found at 
314 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

the Comedie Frangaise; and in Germany, what 
is almost a standard of vocabulary has been set 
in what is now known as Bilhnen-Deutsch. 

In France the Academy was constituted chiefly 
to be a guardian of the language; and the 
Academy, properly conservative as it needs must 
be, is engaged in a slow reform of French ortho- 
graphy, yieldingto the popular demand decorously 
and judiciously. By official action, also, the 
orthography of German has been simplified and 
made more logical and brought into closer rela- 
tion with modern pronunciation. Even more 
thorough reforms have been carried through in 
Italy, in Spain, and in Holland. Yet neither 
French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or 
Dutch, stood half as much in need of the broom 
of reform as English, for in no one of these lan- 
guages were there so many dark corners which 
needed cleaning out ; in no one of them the differ- 
ence between orthography and pronunciation so 
wide; and in no one of them was the accepted 
spelling debased by numberless false etymologies. 

Beyond all question, what is needed on both 
sides of the Atlantic, in the United States as 
well as in Great Britain, is a conviction that the 
existing orthography of English is not sacred, 
and that to tamper with it is not high treason. 
What is needed is the consciousness that neither 
Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his 
^15 



AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING 

dictionary under direct inspiration. What is 
needed is an awakening to the fact that our 
spelling, so far from being immaculate at its best, 
is, at its best, hardly less absurd than the hap- 
hazard, rule-of-thumb, funnily phonetic spelling 
of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings. What is 
needed is anything which will break up the 
lethargy of satisfaction with the accepted ortho- 
graphy, and help to open the eyes of readers and 
writers to the stupidity of the present system and 
tend to make them discontented with it. 
(1892) 



316 



XIII 

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH 
SPELLING 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH 
SPELLING 

IN a communication to a London review Pro- 
fessor W. W. Skeat remarked that " it is no- 
torious that all the leading philologists of Europe, 
during the last quarter of a century, have unani- 
mously condemned the present chaotic spelling 
of the English language, and have received on 
the part of the public generally, and of the most 
blatant and ignorant among the self-constituted 
critics, nothing but abusive ridicule, which is 
meant to be scathing, but is harmless from its 
silliness " ; and it cannot be denied that the ortho- 
graphic simplifications which the leading phi- 
lologists of Great Britain and the United States 
are advocating have not yet been widely adopted. 
In an aggressive article an American essayist has 
sought to explain this by the assertion that pho- 
netic-reform " is hopelessly, unspeakably, sicken- 
ingly vulgar; and this is an eternal reason why 
men and women of taste, refinement, and dis- 
crimination will reject it with a shudder of dis- 
3^9 



THE SIMPLIFICATION Ox^ ENGLISH SPELLING 

gust." Satisfactory as this explanation may seem 
to the essayist, I have a certain difficulty in ac- 
cepting it myself, since I find on the list of the 
vice-presidents of the Orthographic Union the 
names of Mr. Howells, of Colonel Higginson, of 
Dr. Eggleston, of Professor Lounsbury, and of 
President White; and even if I was willing to 
admit that these gentlemen were all of them 
lacking in taste, refinement, and discrimination, 
I still could not agree with the aggressive essay- 
ist so long as my own name was on the same 
list. 

What strikes me as a better explanation is that 
given by the president of the Orthographic 
Union, Mr. Benjamin E. Smith, who has sug- 
gested that phonetic-reformers have asked too 
much, and so have received too little; they have 
demanded an immediate and radical change, and 
as a result they have frightened away all but the 
most resolute radicals ; they have failed to reckon 
with the immense conservatism which gives sta- 
bility to all the institutions of the English- 
speaking race. As Mr. Smith puts it, " there is a 
deep-rooted feeling that the existing printed form 
is not only a symbol but the most fitting symbol 
for our mother-tongue, and that a radical change 
must impair /or us the beauty and spiritual effec- 
tiveness of that which it symbolizes." 

A part of the unreadiness of the public to listen 
320 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

to the advocates of phonetic-reform has been due 
also to the general consciousness that pronuncia- 
tion is not fixed but very variable indeed, being 
absolutely alike in no two places where English 
is spoken, and perhaps in no two persons who 
speak English. The humorous poet has shown 
to us how the little word vase once served as a 
shibboleth to reveal the homes of each of the four 
young ladies who came severally from New 
York and Boston and Philadelphia and Kalama- 
zoo. The difference between the pronunciation 
of New York and Boston is not so marked as 
that between London and Edinburgh— or as that 
between New York and London. And the pro- 
nunciation of to-day is not that of to-morrow; it 
is constantly being modified, sometimes by im- 
perceptible degrees and sometimes by a sudden 
change like the arbitrary substitution of aither and 
naither for eether and neether. Now, if pronunci- 
ation is not uniform in any two persons, in any 
two places, at any two periods, the wayfaring 
man is not to blame if he is in doubt, first, as to 
the possibility of a uniform phonetic spelling, 
and, second, as to its permanence even if it was 
once to be attained. 

A glance down the history of English ortho- 
graphy discloses the fact that, however chaotic our 
spelling may seem to be now or may seem to 
have been in Shakspere's day, it is and it always 

^21 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

has been striving ineffectively to be phonetic. 
Always the attempt has been to use the letters of 
the word to represent its sounds. From the be- 
ginning there has been an unceasing struggle to 
keep the orthography as phonetic as might be. 
This continuous striving toward exactness of 
sound-reproduction has never been radical or vio- 
lent; it has always been halting and half-hearted: 
but it has been constant, and it has accomplished 
marvels in the course of the centuries. The 
most that we can hope to do is to help along 
this good work, to hasten this inevitable but be- 
lated progress, to make the transitions as easy as 
possible, and to smooth the way so that the 
needful improvements may follow one another as 
swiftly as shall be possible. We must reiriem- 
ber that a half-loaf is better than no bread; and 
we must remind ourselves frequently that the 
greatest statesmen have been opportunists, know- 
ing what they wanted, but taking what they 
could get. 

We have now to face the fact that in no lan- 
guage is a sudden and far-reaching reform in 
spelling ever likely to be attained; and in none is 
it less likely than in English. The history of the 
peoples who use our tongue on both sides of the 
Atlantic proves that they belong to a stock which 
is wont to make haste slowly, to take one step at 
a time, and never to allow itself to be overmas- 
322 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

tered by mere logic. By a series of gradations 
almost invisible the loose confederacy of 1776 
developed into the firm union of 186 1, which was 
glad to grant to Abraham Lincoln a power broader 
than that wielded by any dictator. Even the 
abolition of the corn-laws and the adoption of 
free-trade in Great Britain, sudden as it may seem, 
was only the final result of a long series of 
events. 

The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling 
being impracticable,— even if it was altogether 
desirable, —the efforts of those who are dissatis- 
fied with the prevailing orthography of our lan- 
guage had best be directed toward the perfectly 
practical end of getting our improvement on the 
instalment plan. We must seek now to have 
only the most flagrant absurdities corrected. We 
must be satisfied to advance little by little. We 
must begin by showing that there is nothing 
sacrosanct about the present spelling either in 
Great Britain or in the United States. We must 
make it clear to all who are willing to listen— and 
it is our duty to be persuasive always and never 
dogmatic— that the effort of the English language 
to rid itself of orthographic anomalies is almost 
as old as the language itself. We must show 
those who insist on leaving the present spelling 
undisturbed that in taking this attitude they are 
setting themselves in opposition to the past, 
323 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

which they pretend to respect. The average man 
is open to conviction if you do not try to brow- 
beat him into adopting your beliefs; and he can 
be induced to accept improvements, one at a 
time, if he has it made plain to him that each of 
these is but one in a series unrolling itself since 
Chaucer. We must convince the average man 
that we want merely to continue the good work 
of our forefathers, and that the real innovators are 
those who maintain the absolute inviolability of 
our present spelling. 

Even the vehement essayist from whom I have 
quoted already, and who is the boldest of later 
opponents of phonetic-reform, is vehement chiefly 
against the various schemes of wholesale revi- 
sion. He himself refuses to make any modifi- 
cation,— except to revert now and again to a 
medievalism like pcedagogue,— but he knows the 
history of language too well not to be forced to 
admit that a simplification of some sort is certain 
to be achieved in the future. " The written forms 
of English words will change in time, as the lan- 
guage itself will change," he confesses; "it will 
change in its vocabulary, in its idioms, in its 
pronunciation, and perhaps to some extent in its 
structural form. For change is the one essential 
and inevitable phenomenon of a living language, 
as it is of any living organism ; and with these 
changes, slow and silent and unconscious, will 
324 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

come a change in the orthography." As we read 
this admirable statement we cannot but wonder 
why a writer who understands so well the con- 
ditions of linguistic growth should wish to bind 
his own language in the cast-iron bonds of an 
outworn orthography. We may wonder also 
why he is not consistent in his own practice, and 
why he does not spell phcenomenon as Macaulay 
did only threescore and ten years ago. 

Underneath the American essayist's objection 
to any orthographic simplification in English, and 
underneath the plaintive protests of certain British 
men of letters against "American spelling," so 
called, lies the assumption that there is at the 
present moment a "regular" spelling, which has 
existed time out of mind and which the tasteless 
reformers wish to destroy. For this assumption 
there is no warrant whatever. The orthography 
of our language has never been stable; it has 
always been fluctuating; and no authority has 
ever been given to anybody to lay down laws for 
its regulation. For a convention to have validity 
it must have won general acceptance at some 
period; and the history of English shows that 
there has never been any such common agree- 
ment, expressed or implied, in regard to English 
spelling. Some of the unphonetic forms which 
are most vigorously defended, as hallowed by 
custom and by sentiment, are comparatively re- 
325 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

cent; and others which seem as sacred have had 
foisted into them needless letters conveying false 
impressions about their origins. 

That there is no theory or practice of English 
orthography universally accepted to-day is ob- 
vious to all who may take the trouble to observe 
for themselves. The spelling adopted by the 

* Century Magazine ' is different from that to be 
found in ' Harper's Magazine ' ; and this differs 
again from that insisted upon in the pages'of the 

* Bookman.' The * Century ' has gone a little in 
advance of American spelling generally, as seen in 

* Harper's,' and the ' Bookman ' is intentionally re- 
actionary. In the United States orthography is 
in a healthier state of instability than it is in 
Great Britain, where there is a closer approxima- 
tion to a deadening uniformity; but even in Lon- 
don and Edinburgh those who are on the watch 
can discover many a divergence from the strict 
letter of the doctrine of orthographic rigidity. 

And just as there is no system of English spell- 
ing tacitly agreed on by all men of education 
using the English language at present, so there was 
also no system of English spelling consistently 
and continually used by our ancestors in the past. 
The orthography of Matthew Arnold differs a 
little, altho not much, from the orthography of 
Macaulay; and that in turn a little from the or- 
thography of Johnson. In like manner the spell- 
326 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

ing of Dryden is very different from the spelling 
of Spenser, and the spelling of Spenser is very 
different from the spelling of Chaucer. At no 
time in the long unrolling of English literature 
from Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agree- 
ment among those who used the language as to 
any precise way in which its words should be 
spelled or even as to any theory which should 
govern particular instances. The history of Eng- 
lish orthography is a record still incomplete of 
incessant variation; and a study of it shows 
plainly how there have been changes in every 
generation, some of them logical and some of 
them arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifica- 
tions, and some of them gross perversities. 

Thus we see that those who defend any exist- 
ing orthography, which they choose to regard as 
" regular " and outside of which they affect to 
behold only vulgar aberration, are setting them- 
selves against the example left us by our fore- 
fathers. We see also that those of us who are 
striving to modify our spelling in moderation are 
doing exactly what has been done by every gen- 
eration that preceded us. To repeat in other 
words what I have said already, there is not any 
system of English orthography which is sup- 
ported by a universal convention to-day or which 
has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity. 

The opponents of simplification have been 
327 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

greatly aided by the general acceptance of this 
assumption of theirs that the advocates of sim- 
plification wanted to remove ancient landmarks, 
to break with the past, to introduce endless in- 
novations. The best part of their case will fall 
to the ground when it is generally understood 
that the orthography of our language has never 
been fixed for a decad at a time. And this un- 
derstanding of the real facts of the situation is 
likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by 
the wide circulation of many recent reprints of 
the texts of the great authors of the past in the 
exact spelling of the original edition. So long as 
we were in the habit of seeing the works of 
Shakspere and Steele, of Scott, Thackeray, and 
Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not 
uniform exactly, did not vary widely, we were 
sorely tempted to say that the spelling which 
was good enough for them is good enough for 
us and for our children. 

But when we have in our hands the works 
of those great writers as they were originally 
printed, and when we are forced to remark that 
they spell in no wise alike one to the other; and 
when we discover that such uniformity of or- 
thography they may have seemed to have was 
due, not to any theory of the authors themselves, 
but merely to the practice of the modern print- 
ing-offices and proof-readers— when these things 
328 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

are brought home to us, any superstitious reve- 
rence bids fair to vanish which we may have had 
for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere's 
and Steele's and Scott's and Thackeray's and 
Hawthorne's. 

And one indirect result of this scholarly desire 
to get as near as may be to the masterpiece as the 
author himself presented it to the world, is that 
men of letters and lovers of literature— two 
classes hitherto strangely ignorant of the history 
of the English language and of the constant 
changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its 
syntax, and in its orthography— will at least have 
the chance to acquire information at first hand. 
Their resistance to simplification ought to be- 
come less irreconcilable when the men of letters, 
now its chief opponents, have discovered for 
themselves that there is not now and never has 
been any stable system of orthography. When 
they really grasp the fact that there has been no 
permanency in the past and that there is no uni- 
formity in the present, perhaps they will show 
themselves less unwilling to take the next step 
forward. Just now they are rather like the 
Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted 
to uninvent printing and to undiscover America. 

The most powerful single influence in fixing 
the present absurd spelling of our language was 
undoubtedly Johnson's Dictionary, published in 



The simplification of English spelling 

the middle of the eighteenth century. We can- 
not but respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson 
and his indomitable energy; but the making of 
an English dictionary was not the task for which 
his previous studies had preeminently fitted him. 
Probably he would have succeeded better with a 
Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something 
characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of 
the burly doctor's spending his toil in compiling 
a list of the words in a language the use of which 
he held to be disgraceful in a friend's epitaph. 
Johnson was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be 
found to record English orthography, a task calling 
for a science the existence of which he did not 
even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he 
lacked absolutely. In all matters of taste he was 
an elephantine pachyderm; and there are only a 
few of his principles of criticism which are not 
now disestablished. 

Any one whose reading is at all varied and who 
strays outside of books printed within the past 
quarter-century, can find abundant evidence of 
the former chaos of English orthography. In 
Moxon's ' Mechanic Exercises,' published in 1683, 
for example, we read that " how well other For- 
rain languages are Corrected by the Author, we 
may perceive by the English that is Printed in 
Forrain Countries"; and this shows us that the 
phonetic form forrain is older than the unpho- 
330 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

netic foreign. In the 'Spectator' (No. 510) 
Steele wrote landskip where we should now 
write landscape ; in Addison's criticism of ' Para- 
dise Lost,' contributed to the same periodical, we 
find critick, heroick, and epick ; and whether 
Steele or Addison held the pen, ribbons were then 
always ribands. 

On the title-page of the first edition of ' Rob- 
inson Crusoe,' published in 17 19, we are told that 
we can read within " an account of how he was 
at last strangely delivered by Py rates. " Fielding, 
in the ' Champion ' in 1740, tells us that " dinner 
soon follow'd, being a gammon of bacon and 
some chickens, with a most excellent a.pp\e-pye." 
In the same essay Fielding wrote that '* our friends 
exprest great pleasure at our drinking " ; and in 
* Tom Jones ' he wrote prof est for professed (as 
we should now spell it). Here we discover that 
the nineteenth century is sometimes more back- 
ward than the eighteenth, profest and exprest 
being the very spellings which many are now 
advocating. Fielding also wrote Salique where 
we should now write Salic, as Wotton had writ- 
ten Doriqne for Doric in a letter to Milton; and 
here the advantage is with us. So it is also in 
our spelling of the italicized word in the playbill 
of the third night of Mr. Cooper's engagement at 
the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796: 
" Smoaking in the Theatre Prohibited." 
33'^ 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

Attention has already been called to Macaulay's 
phcenomenon (and to Professor Peck's pCBda- 
gogite). The abolition of the digraph has been 
a protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a 
translation of Schlegel's ' Lectures on Dramatic 
Literature." published in London early in the 
nineteenth century, I have found cera for era ; and 
in the eighteenth century economics was (econom- 
ics. Esthetic has not yet quite expelled cesthetic, 
altho anesthetic seems now fairly established. 

The Greek ph is also a stumbling-block. We 
write phantom on the one hand and fancj on the 
other, and either phantasy or fa7itasy; yet all 
these words are derived from the same Greek 
root. ?xdbdiO\y phancy would seem as absurd to 
most of us as fantom. Yet fantasy has only 
recently begun to get the better of phantasy. The 
Italians are bolder than we are, for they have not 
hesitated to write filosofia and fotografia. To 
most of us fotografer, as we read it on a sign in 
Union Square, seems truly outlandish; and yet if 
our great-grandfathers were willing to accept 
fancy there is no logical reason why our great- 
grandchildren may not accept /(9/<9^rj/>'. There 
is no longer any logical basis for opposition on 
the ground of scholarship. Indeed, the scholarly 
opposition to these orthographic simplifications 
is not unlike the opposition in Germany to the 
adoption of the Roman alphabet by those who 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

cling to the old Gothic letter on the ground that 
it is more German, altho it is in reality only 
a medieval corruption of the Roman letter. With 
those who speak German, as with those who 
speak English, the chief obstacle to the accom- 
plishment of proposed improvements in writing 
the language is to be found in the general igno- 
rance of- its history— or perhaps rather in that 
conceited half-knowledge which is always more 
dangerous than modest ignorance. 

To diffuse accurate information about the his- 
tory of English orthography is the most pressing 
and immediate duty now before those of us who 
wish to see our spelling simplified. We must 
keep reminding those we wish to convince that 
we want their aid in helping along the movement 
which has in the past changed musique to 7nusic, 
riband to ribbon, phantasy to fantasy, cera to 
era, pha^nonienon to phenomenon, and which in 
the present is changing catalogue to catalog, aes- 
thetic to esthetic, programme to program, technique 
to technic. 

There never has been any "regular" spelling 
accepted by everybody, or any system of or- 
thography sustained by universal convention. To 
assume that there is anything of the sort is 
adroitly to beg the very question at issue. There 
are always in English many words the spelling of 
which is not finally fixed; and these doubtful 
333 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

orthographies Professor Peck, for example, would 
decide in one way and Professor Skeat would de- 
cide in another. The most of Professor Peck's 
decisions would result in conforming his spelling 
to that which obtains in the printing-office of the 
London Times, but in several cases he would 
exercise the right of private judgment, spelling 
pcedagogue, for example, and Vergil. But if he 
chooses to exercise the right of private judgment, 
he is estopped from denying this right also to 
Professor Skeat; and the moment either of them 
sets up the personal equation as a guide, all pre- 
tense of an accepted system vanishes. 

It is our duty also to draw attention to the 
fact that it is a wholesome thing that there is 
no accepted system and that the orthography of 
our language should be free to modify itself in 
the future as it has in the past. It is this absence 
of system which gives fluidity and flexibility and 
the faculty of adaptation to changing conditions. 
The Chief Justice of England, when he addressed 
the American Bar Association, recorded his pro- 
test against a cast-iron code in law as tending to 
hinder legal development; and our language, like 
our law, must beware lest it lose its power of 
conforming to the needs of our people as these 
may be unexpectedly developed. Just as the 
conservatism of the English-speaking stock makes 
it highly improbable that any sweeping change in 
334 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

our spelling will ever be made, so the enterprise 
of the English-speaking stock, its energy and its 
common sense, make it highly improbable that 
any system will long endure which cramps and 
confines and prevents progress and simplification. 

Finally, we must all of us bend our energies 
to combating the notion that, as Mr. Smith 
has put it, '' the existing printed form is not 
only a symbol but the most fitting symbol of 
our mother-tongue." There is an almost super- 
stitious veneration felt by most of us for the 
spellings we learnt at school; they seem to us 
sanctified by antiquity; and perhaps even an in- 
quiry into the history of the language is not 
always enough to disestablish this reverence for 
false gods. Yet knowledge helps to free us from 
servitude to idols; and when we are told that the 
so-called "accepted spelling" has "dignity," we 
may ask ourselves what dignity there can be in 
the spelling of harbour with an inserted u which 
is not pronounced, which has been thrust in com- 
paratively recently, and which is etymologically 
misleading. 

In his effective answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
argument against the metric system, President 
T. C. Mendenhall remarked that " ignorant preju- 
dice " is not so dangerous an obstacle to human 
progress, nor as common, as what may be called 
"intelligent prejudice," meaning thereby "an 
335 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

obstinate conservatism which makes people cling 
to what is or has been, merely because it is or 
has been, not being willing to take the trouble to 
do better, because already doing well, all the 
while knowing that doing better is not only the 
easier, but is more in harmony v/ith existing con- 
ditions. Such conservatism is highly developed 
among English-speaking people on both sides of 
the Atlantic. " It is just such conservatism as this 
that those of us will have to overcome who wish 
to see our English orthography continue its life- 
long efforts toward simplification. 

To understand how unfortunate for the cause 
of progress it is when its leaders miscalculate 
the popular inertia and when they are therefore 
moved to demand more than seems reasonable 
to the people as a whole, we have only to con- 
sider the result of the joint action, in 1883, of the 
Philological Society of England and of the Ameri- 
can Philological Association, in consequence of 
which certain rules were prepared to simplify 
our spelling. Here was a union of indisputable 
authorities in favor of an amended orthography; 
but unfortunately the changes suggested were 
both many and various. They were too various 
to please any but the most resolute radicals; 
and they were too many to be remembered 
readily by the great majority of every-day folk 
taking no particular interest in the subject. They 
33(> 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

included theater, honor, advertise, catalog; and 
had they not included anything else, or had they 
included only a very few similar simplifications, 
these spellings might have won acceptance in the 
past score of years, even in Great Britain ; the same 
authorities would now be in a position to make 
a few further suggestions equally easy to re- 
member, with a fair hope that these would 
establish themselves in turn. 

Owing to this attempt to do too much all at 
once, the joint action of the two great philologi- 
cal organizations came to naught. Such effect as 
it had was indirect at best. It may have been 
the exciting cause of the so-called " Printers' 
Rules," which were approved and recommended 
by many of the leading typographers of the 
United States a few years later. These printers' 
rules were few and obvious. They suggested 
catalog, program, epaulet, esthetic— dW of which 
have become more familiar of late. They sug- 
gested further opposit, hypocrit, etc., and also 
fotograf, fonetic, etc. ; and these simplifications 
have not yet been adopted widely enough to pre- 
vent the words thus emended from seeming a 
little strange to all those who had paid no spe- 
cial attention to the subject. And these un- 
interested outsiders are the very people who are 
to be converted. To them and to them only 
must all argument be addressed. We may rest 
337 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

assured that we have slight chance of bringing 
over to our side any of those who have actually 
enlisted against us. We must not count on de- 
sertions from the enemy; we must enroll the 
neutrals at every opportunity. 

Probably the most important action yet taken 
in regard to our orthography was that of the 
National Educational Association in formally 
adopting for use in all its official publications 
twelve simplified spellings— program, tho, altbo, 
thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, catalog, prolog, 
decalog, demagog, pedagog. These simplified 
spellings were immediately adopted in the ' Edu- 
cational Review' and in other periodicals edited 
by members of the association. They are very 
likely to appear with increasing frequency in the 
school-books which members may hereafter pre- 
pare; and any simplified spelling which once gets 
itself into a school-book is pretty sure to hold its 
own in the future. After an interval of ten or 
fifteen years the National Educational Association 
will be in a position to consider the situation 
again; and it may then decide that these twelve 
words have established themselves in their new 
form sufficiently widely and firmly to make it 
probable that the association could put forward 
another list of a dozen more simplified spellings 
with a reasonable certainty that those also will be 
accepted. 

338 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

The United States government appointed a 
board to decide on a uniform orthography for 
geographical names; and the recommendations 
of this body were generally in the direction of 
increased simplicity— 5^n>z^' Straits, for example. 
The spellings thus officially adopted by the na- 
tional government were at once accepted by the 
chief publishers of school text-books. And these 
makers of school-books also follow the rules 
formulated by a committee of the American As- 
sociation for the Advancement of Science ap- 
pointed to bring about uniformity in the spelling 
and pronunciation of chemical terms. Among 
the rules formulated by the committee and 
adopted by the association were two which 
dropped a terminal e from certain chemical terms 
entering into more general use. Thus the men 
of science now write oxid, iodid, chlorid, etc., 
and quinin, morphin, anilin, etc., altho the gen- 
eral public has not relinquished the earlier ortho- 
graphy, oxide and quinine. Even the word 
toxin, which came into being since the adoption 
of these rules by the associated scientists, is 
sometimes to be seen in newspapers as toxine. 

Thus we see that there is progress all along the 
line; it may seem very slow, like that of a gla- 
cier, but it is as certain as it is irresistible. There 
is no call for any of us to be disheartened by 
the prospect. We may, indeed, each of us do 
339 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING 

what little we can severally toward hastening the 
result. We can form the habit of using in our 
daily writing such simplified spellings as will not 
seem affected or freakish, keeping ourselves al- 
ways in the forefront of the movement, but never 
going very far in advance of the main body. We 
must not make a fad of orthographic ameliora- 
tion, nor must we devote to it a disproportionate 
share of our activity— since we know that there 
are other reforms as pressing as this and even 
more important. But we can hold ourselves 
ready always to lend a hand to help along the 
cause; and we can show our willingness always 
to stand up and be counted in its favor. 
(1898-1901) 



340 



XIV 

AMERICANISM-AN ATTEMPT 
AT A DEFINITION 



AMERICANISM-AN ATTEMPT 
AT A DEFINITION 

THERE are many words in circulation among 
us which we understand fairly well, which 
we use ourselves, and which we should, how- 
ever, find it difficult to define. I think that 
Americanism is one of these words; and I think 
also it is well for us to inquire into the exact 
meaning of this word, which is often most care- 
lessly employed. More than once of late have we 
heard a public man praised for his '' aggressive 
Americanism," and occasionally we have seen a 
man of letters denounced for his '* lack of Ameri- 
canism." Now what does the word really mean 
when it is thus used } 

It means, first of all, a love for this country of 
ours, an appreciation of the institutions of this 
nation, a pride in the history of this people to 
which we belong. And to this extent Ameri- 
canism is simply another word for patriotism. 
But it means also, I think, more than this: it 
means a frank acceptance of the principles which 
343 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

underlie our government here in the United 
States. It means, therefore, a faith in our fellow- 
man, a belief in liberty and in equality. It im- 
plies, further, so it seems to me, a confidence in 
the future of this country, a confidence in its 
destiny, a buoyant hopefulness that the right 
will surely prevail. 

In so far as Americanism is merely patriotism, 
it is a very good thing. The man who does not 
think his own country the finest in the world is 
either a pretty poor sort of a man or else he has 
a pretty poor sort of a country. If any people 
have not patriotism enough to make them willing 
to die that the nation may live, then that people 
will soon be pushed aside in the struggle of life, 
and that nation will be trampled upon and 
crushed; probably it will be conquered and ab- 
sorbed by some race of a stronger fiber and of a 
sterner stock. Perhaps it is difficult to declare 
precisely which is the more pernicious citizen of 
a republic when there is danger of war with 
another nation— the man who wants to fight, 
right or wrong, or the man who does not want 
to fight, right or wrong; the hot-headed fellow 
who would plunge the country into a deadly 
struggle without first exhausting every possible 
chance to obtain an honorable peace, or the cold- 
blooded person who would willingly give up 
anything and everything, including honor itself, 
344 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

sooner than risk the loss of money which every 
war surely entails. '* My country, right or 
wrong," is a good motto only when we add to 
it, "and if she is in the wrong, I '11 help to put 
her in the right." To shrink absolutely from a 
fight where honor is really at stake, this is the 
act of a coward. To rush violently into a quar- 
rel when war can be avoided without the sacri- 
fice of things dearer than life, this is the act of a 
fool. 

True patriotism is quiet, simple, dignified; it 
is not blatant, verbose, vociferous. The noisy 
shriekers who go about with a chip on their 
shoulders and cry aloud for war upon the slight- 
est provocation belong to the class contemptu- 
ously known as ** Jingoes." They may be pa- 
triotic,— and as a fact they often are,— but their 
patriotism is too frothy, too hysteric, too unin- 
telligent, to inspire confidence. True patriotism 
is not swift to resent an insult; on the contrary, 
it is slow to take offense, slow to believe that an 
insult could have been intended. True patriot- 
ism, believing fully in the honesty of its own 
acts, assumes also that others are acting with the 
same honesty. True patriotism, having a solid 
pride in the power and resources of our country, 
doubts always the likelihood of any other nation 
being willing carelessly to arouse our enmity. 

In so far, therefore, as Americanism is merely 
345 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

patriotism it is a very good thing, as I have tried 
to point out. But Americanism is something 
more than patriotism. It calls not only for love of 
our common country, but also for respect for our 
fellow-man. It implies an actual acceptance of 
equality as a fact. It means a willingness always 
to act on the theory, not that *' I 'm as good as the 
other man," but that " the other man is as good as 
I am." It means leveling up rather than leveling 
down. It means a regard for law, and a desire to 
gain our wishes and to advance our ideas always 
decently and in order, and with deference to the 
wishes and the ideas of others. It leads a man 
always to acknowledge the good faith of those 
with whom he is contending, whether the con- 
test is one of sport or of politics. It prevents a 
man from declaring, or even from thinking, that 
all the right is on his side, and that all the hon- 
est people in the country are necessarily of his 
opinion. 

And, further, it seems to me that true Ameri- 
canism has faith and hope. It believes that the 
world is getting better, if not year by year, at 
least century by century; and it believes also that 
in this steady improvement of the condition of 
mankind these United States are destined to do 
their full share. It holds that, bad as many 
things may seem to be to-day, they were worse 
yesterday, and they will be better to-morrow. 
346 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

However dark the outlook for any given cause 
may be at any moment, the man imbued with 
the true spirit of Americanism never abandons 
hope and never relaxes effort; he feels sure that 
everything comes to him who waits. He knows 
that all reforms are inevitable in the long run ; 
and that if they do not finally establish them- 
selves it is because they are not really reforms, 
tho for a time they may have seemed to be. 

And a knowledge of the history of the American 
people will supply ample reasons for this faith 
in the future. The sin of negro-slavery never 
seemed to be more secure from overthrow than 
it did in the ten years before it was finally abol- 
ished. A study of the political methods of the 
past will show that there has been immense im- 
provement in many respects; and it is perhaps in 
our political methods that we Americans are most 
open to censure. That there was no deteriora- 
tion of the moral stamina of the whole people 
during the first century of the American republic 
any student can make sure of by comparing the 
spirit which animated the inhabitants of the 
thirteen colonies during the Revolution with 
the spirit which animated the population of the 
northern states (and of the southern no less) 
during the civil war. We are accustomed to sing 
the praises of our grandfathers who won our 
independence, and very properly; but our grand- 
347 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

children will have also to sing the praises of our 
fathers who stood up against one another for 
four years of the hardest fighting the world has 
ever seen, bearing the burdens of a protracted 
struggle with an uncomplaining cheerfulness 
which was not a characteristic of the earlier war. 

True Americanism is sturdy but modest. It is 
as far removed from "Jingoism" in times of 
trouble as it is from " Spread-Eagleism " in times 
of peace. It is neither vainglorious nor boastful. 
It knows that the world was not created in 1492, 
and that July 4, 1776, is not the most important 
date in the whole history of mankind. It does 
not overestimate the contribution which America 
has made to the rest of the world, nor does it 
underestimate this contribution. True American- 
ism, as I have said, has a pride in the past of this 
great country of ours, and a faith in the future ; 
but none the less it is not so foolish as to think 
that all is perfection on this side of the Atlantic, 
and that all is imperfection on the other side. 

It knows that some things are better here than 
anywhere else in the world, that some things are 
no better, and that some things are not so good 
in America as they are in Europe. For example, 
probably the institutions of the nation fit the 
needs of the population with less friction here in 
the United States than in any other country in 
the world. But probably, also, there is no other 
348 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

one of the great nations of the world in which 
the government of the large cities is so wasteful 
and so negligent. 

True Americanism recognizes the fact that 
America is the heir of the ages, and that it is for 
us to profit as best we can by the experience of 
Europe, not copying servilely what has been 
successful in the old world, but modifying 
what we borrow in accord with our own needs 
and our own conditions. It knows, and it has 
no hesitation in declaring, that we must always 
be the judges ourselves as to whether or not we 
shall follow the example of Europe. Many times 
we have refused to walk in the path of European 
precedent, preferring very properly to blaze out 
a track for ourselves. More often than not this 
independence was wise, but now and again it 
was unwise. 

Finally, one more quality of true Americanism 
must be pointed out. It is not sectional. It does 
not dislike an idea, a man, or a political party 
because that idea, that man, or that party comes 
from a certain part of the country. It permits a 
man to have a healthy pride in being a son of 
Virginia, a citizen of New York, a native of Mas- 
sachusetts, but only on condition that he has a 
pride still stronger that he is an American, a citi- 
zen of the United States. True Americanism is 
never sectional. It knows no north and no 

349 



AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION 

south, no east and no west. And as it has no 
sectional hkes and dislikes, so it has no interna- 
tional likes and dislikes. It never puts itself in 
the attitude of the Englishman who said, " I 've 
no prejudices, thank Heaven, but I do hate a 
Frenchman!" It frowns upon all appeals to the 
former allegiance of naturalized citizens of this 
country; and it thinks that it ought to be enough 
for any man to be an American without the aid 
of the hyphen which makes him a British-Ameri- 
can, an Irish-American, or a German-American. 

True Americanism, to conclude, feels that a 
land which bred Washington and Franklin in the 
last century, and Emerson and Lincoln in this 
century, and which opens its schools wide to give 
every boy the chance to model himself on these 
great men, is a land deserving of Lowell's praise 
as " a good country to live in, a good country to 
live for, and a good country to die for." 

(1896) 



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